We arrived at the Consulate just as the Vice-Consul, accompanied by the Consular kavass, was starting on an official tour of investigation. This was an opportunity we could not afford to miss. We attached ourselves to the Vice-Consul, and the gentleman protested. But he was courteous in his objections to our company, and we remained with him. His great solicitude was to know the exact number of the slain on both sides, a fact which concerned us less than graphic accounts of the fighting; for it is a duller story to say a thousand people were put to the sword than to give in detail the way a single Christian died. H.M. Vice-Consul was a careful young man, with little confidence in correspondents. He evidently thought it would be useless to provide us with accurate information, and took no trouble to point out to us that the slaughter had not assumed the proportions of what might in Turkey be called a massacre. He seemed to concern himself chiefly with priming himself to contradict in his official despatches the gross exaggerations wherein we would undoubtedly indulge; and in view of his services to us we were both sincerely sorry to disappoint him. The dead were all now removed from the streets, though the routes taken by the carts in which they were collected could still be traced to the trenches by clotted drippings of blood and bloody wads of rags on the roads. The Consul led the way to the Bulgarian cemeteries in the hope of being able to count the corpses, but the last spadeful of earth was just being shovelled into the long graves as we entered the gates. We could only, therefore, estimate the number. We paced off the dimensions of the excavations, and, taking the word of the Turkish official that the bodies were laid but one row deep, estimated that there could not be more than twenty in a trench--and, as far as we knew, there were but three trenches throughout the city. [Illustration: THE WRECK OF THE OTTOMAN BANK.] [Illustration: ENTERING THE DYNAMITERS’ DEN.] From the cemetery we followed the Consul to the site of the Ottoman Bank and passed with him through the cordon of troops which surrounded the ruins. Workmen were busily engaged uncovering a tunnel under the street leading from a little shop opposite to a vital spot beneath the bank. The little shop was that which I had watched so often from my window in the Hôtel Colombo. The peasants I had seen enter and leave the place had been, many of them, insurgents in disguise. The stock displayed in front was only a ruse to cover the real merchandise, which had come all the way from France and had been passed by the Turkish Customs officials on the payment of substantial backsheesh. We were told that ‘special’ customers of this shop went away nightly with heavy baskets, now suspected of containing the earth excavated during each day. It is said to have taken the insurgents forty days to cut the tunnel, by means of which they were able to blow up the bank.