Before the English lay-brothers could make any answer, the foul smell, which kept growing stronger, was accompanied by a terrible rumbling noise:—and then there came most violent gusts of wind, which extinguished all the lamps, cressets, torches, and candles; and then, upon the darkness of the hall, there burst a livid, ghastly, blue light, and above and below, from side to side, the hall seemed filled with streaming blue flames, and still that atrocious stench grew stronger and stronger! Abbat, monks, men-at-arms, and all, rushed out of the hall, some crying that it was the eve of the day of judgment, and some roaring that it must be the devils of Crowland come back again. Outside the hall, in the darkened corridor (and by this time there was not a single lamp left burning in any part of the house, but only the altar-lights in the church) they ran against and stumbled over other Frenchmen who were running up from the inferior offices and from the stables, for they had all and several been driven away by blue lights and foul smells; and every mother’s son of them believed that the Crowland devils had been sent to dispossess them and drive them back to Normandie. The corridor was long and straight, but as dark as pitch; some fell in their flight and rolled the one over the other, and some stood stock still and silent as stocks, save that their knees knocked together and their teeth chattered; and some ran forward howling for mercy, and confessing their sins to that hell-darkness. But, when near the end of the long dark passage, a French monk and a man-at-arms that ran the foremost of them all fell through the flooring with a hideous crash, and were heard shrieking from some unexplored regions below, that the fiends had gotten them—that the devils of Crowland were whirling them off to the bottomless pit! [The pit or fetid pool into which these two evil-doers were thrown was not bottomless, though deep; yet I wist nothing was ever more seen either of that monk or of that man-at-arms.] As these piercing shrieks were heard from below, the Normans roared in the corridor—some blaspheming and cursing the day and hour that they came to England, others praying to be forgiven, with many a _Libera nos!_ and _Salve!_ and others gnashing their teeth and yelling like maniacs. But some there were that made no noise at all, for they had swooned through excess of fear.