Then I started back, nearly suffocated. A great rolling cloud of thick yellow smoke met me and completely enveloped me. In an instant I realized what it meant--the house was on fire! Making a wild dart for the shuttered window of the middle room, I banged and hammered at it with all my might and main, using both the hilt of Townsend's sword, which I carried, and the handle of my revolver, but all to no purpose. There was no doubt about it: I was completely trapped. But, meantime, what had become of all my men--the twenty enthusiastic volunteers who had smashed in the door of the compound and rushed in along with me--where had they got to? A smell of hot smoke filled the room, and from outside the roaring as of a mighty wind, accompanied by the crackling of musketry, was all the sound that I could hear. Then it suddenly dawned upon me that the crackling was not that of musketry, the roaring not that of wind--but of the town and compound on fire and fiercely blazing like the house I was entrapped in. There was no mistaking those ominous red gleams that now began to be reflected through the imperfectly-fitted shutter. Suddenly the roar became deafening, and a great lurid tongue of flame shot across the room, accompanied by a blast of heat that nearly choked me. I had barely time to make a dash for the third chamber before the fire took complete possession of the middle one. The heat and the smoke were terrible. I made a spring for the farther wall in order to try to force my way through the roof, which at this, the extreme, end of the house had not yet caught alight. Three times did I make the attempt, but each time fell back, unable to get a hand-hold on the top of the wall. At the third attempt, on staggering back, my foot got entangled in one of the mats that were lying on the floor and I tripped and fell, half fainting from the terrible smoke and heat. As I went down the mats seemed to give way, and with great force the lower half of my body--my left hip and leg--struck against the side of some kind of cavity, into which I found I had half fallen, for, whilst I had come on the floor with my hands, the rest of me swung into space. In that moment I understood, to some extent, why that house held such strange echoes.