A crackling sound, heard vaguely, had started him to his feet. He struck aside the foliage. There was no sky!—only a flying mass of gray and white, near enough, it looked, to be touched with his hand. The palace was afire. At a bound he was clear of the shrubbery. The roof over the entrance was a solid flame. While he stood, transfixed, it swept forward right and left with the speed of wind. He dashed through a shower of fire to the doors. The building opposite was a furnace. "Bang!" snapped the falconet at the foot of the street. He rushed to the rear, racing with the flames roaring along the roofs on both sides of the court, and reached the passage, now full of smoke. From its mouth he saw the pikemen looking toward him at the fire. Should he venture a dash to cut through their lines? Hopeless, hopeless! But to be burned alive! Yet the main court was broad. Would he not be out of reach of the flames in its centre? It was the one chance. A flash of fire overhead drove him back into the palace. The passages and rooms were dense and stifling, and once he lost his way; found it again, and crept the rest of the distance to the court on his hands and knees; reached it, blind, and half stupefied. Gasping and choking, he dragged himself to the shrubbery, only half conscious of the leaping, blazing tumult surrounding him. The entrance had disappeared, curtained by burning thatch fallen from the eaves. The air was growing hot, and the open doorways which before had been obscure, now showed a dull illumination. For a few minutes the atmosphere was fairly free to breathe, but as the roof timbers began to give way the rooms filled with burning straw from above, and great spurts and volumes of smoke rolled into the court from the doors and windows. Cristoval lay with face pressed to the earth for its coolness and the stratum of purer air. Overhead the leaves were shrivelling and drooping. Burning wisps of thatch, then sheaves and armfuls, were soaring upward in the blast and strewing the ground about him. He was protected by his armor, but in danger of suffocation, and his breathing grew momentarily more labored, until every inspiration was like a draught of fire itself.