An unnameable fear! A dread surpassing all power of expression! Such terror as might abase a man to the very dust, send him weeping like a child, or craving mercy from his bitterest enemy. This I suffered in that moment when my imagination reeled at its own thoughts, when it depicted for me the agony that a man must suffer, cast pitilessly into the bowels of a flaming furnace, and burned to ashes as coal is burned when the blast is turned upon it. Nothing under heaven or earth would I not have given the men if thereby the dread of the fire had been taken from me. I believe that I would have bartered my very soul for the salvation of the pistol or the knife. Let this be told, and then that which follows after is the more readily understood. The men dragged me down into the pit and stood crying about me like so many ravening wolves. The Jew, forcing his way through the press, uttered strange sounds, incoherent and terrible, and seeming to say that he had already judged and condemned me. In such a sense the men interpreted him, and two of them moving the great levers which opened the furnace doors, they revealed the very heart of the monstrous fire, white as the glory of the sun, glowing as a lake of flame, a torrid, molten, unnameable fire toward which strong arms impelled me, blows thrust me, the naked bodies of the human devils impelled me. For my part, I turned upon them as a man upon the brink of the most terrible death conceivable. They had snatched my revolver from me. I had but my strong arms, my lithe shoulders, to pit against theirs; and with these I fought as a wild beast at bay. Now upon my feet, now down amongst them, striking savage blows at their upturned faces, it is no boast to say that their very numbers thwarted their purpose and delayed the issue. And, more than this, I found another ally, one neither in their calculations nor my own. This befriended me beyond all hope, served me as no human friendship could have done. For, in a word, it soon appeared that they could thrust me but a little way toward the furnace doors, and beyond that point were impotent. The heat overpowered them. Trained as they were, they could not suffer it. I saw them falling back from me one by one. I heard them vainly crying for this measure or for that. The furnace mastered them. It left me at last alone before its open doors, and, staggering to my feet, I fell headlong in a faint that death might well have terminated. * * * * *