As soon as Gaspard de Caïs and his companions were well within the gate they suddenly drew their swords and, with a shout, fell like madmen upon the unsuspecting guard who were still standing at attention. This was a signal to the Bastard and to his friends within and without the town. These worthies all rushed to the gate and in a few moments the governor and the gallant guard of Eze were dead or dying. All this time the Turks, in single file, were crawling up the zigzag path from the boats, like a great brown serpent, a mile long, gliding up out of the water. They poured in through the gate, panting and yelling, and continued to pour in for hours. Barbarossa now could laugh aloud and did no doubt guffaw heartily enough for Eze the impregnable was taken with scarcely the loss of a man. What followed is, in the language of novelists, “better imagined than described”; simply because it is easy to imagine but difficult to describe. Eze the betrayed became the scene of a blurred orgy of house burning, murder and pillage. The town with all that was in it was to be wiped off the face of the earth. The order could not have been carried out more thoroughly or more heartily if it had been executed by the Germans of the present day. There was no resistance. There was to be no quarter and no prisoners. Everything went “according to plan.” The narrowness of the lanes rendered the process of hacking a population to death cramped, slow and very horrible. Every street and alley was soon blocked with the dead and the dying. The first clatter of hurrying feet was soon hushed; for those who pressed on and those who fled trod upon yielding bodies. A whole family would be lying dead in an entry; the man at the front, the baby and the mother behind. Here would be the corpse of a Turk sprawling over the bundle of loot he was in the act of carrying away. Here would be a woman’s dead hand cut off at the wrist, but still clinging to the handle of a door. Here a disembowelled man, still alive, trying to crawl into a cellar and there a half-charred body dangling from the window of a burning house. It is always customary to say, in the account of scenes like this, that “the streets ran with blood,” but it is not so. The state is far more hideous, since blood clots so soon that it will not run. The noise must have been peculiarly dreadful, an awful medley of the shouts of men, the shrieks of the butchered, the moans of the dying, mingled with the roaring of flames and the fall of blazing timbers. Now and then, among the din, would be heard the crash of an axe upon a skull, the crack of a sword upon the tense bones of a bent back, the muffled thud of a dagger, the hammer-blow of a club. The sunlight and the blue of heaven were shut off by a pall of smoke; while suffocating clouds filled many a lane with the blackness of night.