The road to the Ganges, a little over a mile in length, crossed a little wooden bridge painted white, and swung to the right down a ravine to the river. “A vast multitude,” says Trevelyan, “speechless and motionless as spectres, watched their descent into that valley of the shadow of death.” Directly the last Englishman had crossed the bridge and turned down the lane, a double line of Sepoys was drawn across the entrance to the Ghaut, and slowly the great company made its way down to the river’s edge. Some forty boats were lying there—eight-oared country budgerows, clumsy structures, with thatched roofs, and looking not unlike floating hay-stacks. They lay in the shallow water a few yards from the bank. A moment’s pause took place when the crowd of sahibs and memsahibs, with their wounded and the little ones, reached the water’s edge. There were no planks by which they could reach the boats, none of the boatmen spoke a word, or made a movement. They sat silent, like spectators at a tragedy. Then the crowd splashed into the water. The wounded were lifted into the boats; women with their children clambered on board; the men were finding their places; the officers, standing knee-deep in the river, were helping the last and feeblest to embark. It was nine o’clock in the morning. Suddenly, in the hot morning air, a bugle screamed shrill and menacing, somewhere up the ravine. It was the signal! Out of the forty boats the native boatmen leaped, and splashed through the water to the bank. Into the straw roofs of many of the boats they thrust, almost in the act of leaping, red-hot embers, and nearly a score of boats were almost instantly red-crested with flames. A little white Hindu temple high up on the bank overlooked the whole scene. Here sat Tantia Topee, the Nana’s general, with a cluster of Sepoy officers. He controlled the whole drama from this point of vantage like a stage-manager; and, on his signal, from the lines of Sepoys who were lying concealed in the undergrowth, from guns perched high on the river-bank, and from both sides of the river at once, there broke upon the forty boats, with their flaming roofs and hapless crowds of white-faced passengers, a terrific storm of shot. Those slain by the sudden bullet were many, and were happy in their fate. The wounded perished under the burning flakes and strangling smoke of the flaming straw roofs. Many leaped into the river, and, crouching chin-deep under the sides of the boats, tried to shelter themselves from the cruel tempest of shot. Some swam out into the stream till they sank in the reddened water under the leisurely aim of the Sepoys. Others, leaping into the water, tried to push off the stranded boats. Some of yet sterner temper, kneeling under the roofs of burning thatch, or standing waist-deep in the Ganges, fired back on the Sepoys, who by this time lined the river’s edge.