But behind him the flames had eaten through the roof of his house and had leaped to the adjoining house. In a few minutes they had bounded clear across an open court near by, and had laid hold of one of the pensions of the university. The wind then veering swept the flames in a seething mass in the direction of the great Rynek, and in less than fifteen minutes after the flight of the two men from the loft of the building, the university section of Krakow was in the grip of a terrible conflagration that threatened to devour the whole city. CHAPTER XIV A GREAT FIRE RAGES Since earliest times Krakow was divided into four sections—the Castle Quarter, the Potters’ Quarter, the Butchers’ Quarter, and the Slavkov. At the head of each of these districts was a quartermaster who was responsible for everything that went on in his district, the fighting of fires being one of his chief concerns. Therefore the watchman from one of the streets that lay in the districts threatened by the fire went pounding at the gate of the quartermaster’s house, shouting “Fire” at the top of his lungs in order to send the servants flying to the master. In a short time the quartermaster was up and dressed, and had sent summons to the water master who had charge of the town reservoir and aqueducts. The bell meanwhile began to sound clamorously from the tower of the Church of Our Lady Mary, for the watchman there had caught sight of the flames. Cries of “fire” were now being echoed from all sections of the city, and in the red glare which was beginning to illumine all the grim Gothic buildings and churches, a very tumult of confusion was arising. The water master had already set his machinery in motion and drummers were pounding away at their drums in all the city streets in order to awaken the merchants and their apprentices upon whom fell the burden of fighting the flames. All the town guilds were assembling, companies of servants from the palaces were filling buckets of water and taking positions on the roofs of their own houses, and all citizens were busily getting down from the wall, hooks and axes and pails such as the law required them to keep for such emergencies. A fire of any size in Krakow was a serious thing in those days, for there were hundreds upon hundreds of wooden and part-wooden houses clustered together in the thickly populated streets. In the section about the old university the majority of dwellings were very ancient, dry, and cobwebbed everywhere, and a single spark upon their roofs was enough to turn them in exceedingly rapid fashion into belching furnaces of flame and smoke. As the fire raced through these streets, the inhabitants poured out in panic-stricken confusion; each building was literally teeming with life, and the whole scene, viewed from above, would have resembled a huge ant hill suddenly destroyed or burned out by a careful gardener.