And yet these battalions of fighters are not to be discouraged. They guess this element to be a blind one, indifferent alike to failure or success. It may rage on and consume the whole city. It may soon be compelled to slink back to a smoldering heap. It appears to desire to burn fiercely, and yet they know that it will give way before its logical foe. Upon it, now, they are heaping a score of streams, beating at distant windows, tearing out distant doors, knocking the bricks from their plastered places, of houses not on fire at all and so setting up a barrier between it and other buildings, destroying in fact the form and order of years in order to make a common level upon which its enemy, water, can meet and defeat it. But these little ants of beings, how they have scurried before this battle royal between these two elements! How fallen! How harried and bereft and tortured they seem! Under these now blackened and charred timbers and fallen bricks and stones and twisted plates of iron are not a few of them, dead. And beyond the still tempestuous battlefield, where flame and water still fight, are thousands more of them, agape with wonder and fear and pity. They do not know what water is, nor fire. They only know what they do, how dangerous they are, how really deadly and how indifferent to their wishes or desires. Forefend! forefend! is the wisest thought that comes to them, else these twain, and other strange and terrible things like them, will devour us all. But these elements. Here they are and here they continue to battle until a given quantity of water has been able to overcome a given amount of fire. Like the fabled battle between the Efrit and the King’s daughter, they have fought each other over rooftops and in cellars and in the very air, where flame and water meet, and under twisted piles of timber and iron and stone. Wherever any of the snaky heads of the demon fire have shown themselves, the flattened gusts of the demon water have assailed them. The two have fought in crevices where no human hand could reach. They have grappled with one another in titanic writhings above the rooftops, where the eyes of all men could see. They have followed one another to unexpected depths, fire showing itself wherever water has neglected to remain, the water returning where the fire has begun its battling anew. They have chased and twisted and turned, until at last, out-generaled in this instance, fire has receded and water conquered all. But the petty little creatures who have been the victims of their contest, the chance occupants of the field upon which they chose to battle. But look at them now, agape with wonder and terror. And how they scurried! How jumped from the windows into nets, how clambered like monkeys down ladders, how gropingly they have staggered through halls of smoke, thick, rich smoke, as dark and soft and smooth as the fleece of a ram and as deadly as death.