He yanked the German away from a puddle of uncongealed stuff, hot as running metal.... The sailor screamed. He had stepped upon what seemed to be an ash-covered stone. It was soft, springy, and vented a wheezy sigh. Rain and rock-dust had smeared all things alike in this gray roasting shambles. "Won't somebody say something?" the sailor cried in a momentary silence. "It looks like rain, ma'm," Macready offered. They had been forced back into the boat, and were skirting the shore around by the _Morne_. Saint Pierre had rushed to the sea--at the last. The volcano had found the women with the children, as all manner of visitations find them--and the men a little apart. Pelée had not faltered. There was nothing to do by the way, no lips to moisten, no voice of pain to hush, no dying thing to ease. There was not an insect-murmur in the air, nor a crawling thing upon the beach, not a moving wing in the hot, gray sky--a necropolis, shore of death absolute. They climbed the cliffs to the north of the _Palms_, glanced down through the smoke at the city--sunken like a toothless mouth. Even the _Morne_ was a husk divested of its fruit. Pelée had cut the cane-fields, sucked the juices and left the blasted stalks in his paste. The old plantation-house pushed forth no shadow of an outline. It might be felled or lost in the smoky distance. The nearer landmarks were gone--homes that had brightened the heights in their day, whose windows had flashed the rays of the afternoon sun as it rode down oversea--levelled like the fields of cane. Pelée had swept far and left only his shroud, and the heaps upon the way, to show that the old sea-road, so white, so beautiful, had been the haunt of man. The mangoes had lost their vesture; the palms were gnarled and naked fingers pointing to the pitiless sky. Macready had known this highway in the mornings, when joy was not dead, when the songs of the toilers and the laughter of children glorified the fields; in the white moonlight, when the sea-winds met and mingled with the spice from tropic hills, and the fragrance from the jasmine and rose-gardens.... He stared ahead now, wetting his puffed and tortured lips. They had passed the radius of terrific heat, but he was thinking of the waiting gray eye, when he returned without the man and the woman. "It'll be back to the bunkers for Dinny," he muttered.... "Ernst, ye goat, you're intertainin', you're loquenchus." They stepped forward swiftly now. There was not a hope that the mountain had shown mercy at the journey's end.... They would find whom they sought down like the others, and the great house about them. Still, there was a vague God to whom Macready had prayed once or twice in his life--a God who had the power to strike blasphemers dead, to still tempests, light volcanic fuses and fell Babylons. To this God he muttered a prayer now....