He drew me back and we stood, figures of tragedy, flashing the light from our candle-ends into dark corners. In all the hideous _mélange_ there were two details unmistakable in their significance. To our right, lying front-downwards with its face smashed into the floor, and its legs caught into the closing throat of the vault, was a little flattened blue-coated figure, its hands flung out, and the left yet closed upon the butt of a pistol. To our left, bolt upright against the wall through which the great rent had been blown into the adjoining crypt, sat a thing grotesque almost beyond naming. It wore, with a little air of sagging weariness, a seaman’s common jersey and good white ducks and shoes with shining buckles, and its right elbow was crooked and the hand beneath rested with a sort of exhausted jauntiness on its bent right knee. In all of which there was wonder, but no indecency, had it not been that, above, the thing had no head, nor any left arm but a stump, which stood oddly upraised from its shoulder. And somehow one knew that these two were correlative in the tragedy, and somehow responsible for the human scatteration between them--for the bright gleams and splotches of colour which budded from the ancient soot of the holocaust--for these gaudy, half-perished weed-heaps scoring the garden of death. “Do you see?” urged Harry again. I sighed and shook my head, not meaning ignorance, but simply overwhelmed under the weight of my own conclusions. “Why,” he whispered, in an awestruck voice; “that--_that_ there was reaching up for the ammunition, the--the armoury in the wall where they kept their powder and things, and, as he opened the cupboard, the other fired his pistol across. The bullet must have missed who it was meant for and gone into a powder barrel.” As he spoke, one of the lights sputtered and went dim; and he caught suddenly at me. “Come away!” he cried. “Why don’t you come? We haven’t candles and to spare.” His words reawoke me instantly to the unresolved horror of our situation. “I’m coming,” I answered tremulously. “Which way? Harry, don’t go without me!” We stumbled a few blind paces, dazzled again for the nonce. “Look here,” he said; “we must economize these. It won’t do to waste our lights.” Instantly, in a panic, I blew out my candle, and simultaneously he blew out his. Thus was illustrated the weakness of generalities; and, correspondingly, the value, as you shall see, of accidents. We were plunged, on the breath, into subterranean night; lapped in lead and buried beyond hope of release. At least, so it seemed for the moment; and moments make the sum of time.