BEFORE AND AFTER ITS FALL 179 
soon a seething caldron under the blast of fire that scourged both 
land and sea. 
_ “Along the water front the piled debris was not so formidable 
as seriously to impede a good climber, but the moment one sought 
to penetrate to Bouille Street, the next thoroughfare back from the 
shore, he encountered difficulties that called for the skill of an 
Alpine mountaineer. Mingled masonry, crumbled mortar, mud 
and ashes formed a foul, noisome series of hillocks, beneath which 
the dead lay in thousands. At every step the explorer encountered 
relics suggestive of the simple home life of the people. The wheels 
and pendulum of a mantel clock were kicked from out the debris as 
the party shuffled through the flying dust. The end of an old spring 
bed projected amid the ruins of a private house, and close beside it 
the relic of a human skull and the fragments of a spinal column 
indicated all that was left of its possible occupant. 
IN A TANGLE OF RUINS 
“ Pushing through Bouille Street to the northward, the tangle 
became more and more intricate. Here and there the stone walls 
of the taller buildings, cracked and crumbling, leaned menacingly 
outward toward the centre of the street. Seamed and rent with 
jagged cracks from base to top, they looked as though the slightest 
jar might bring them tumbling about the heads of those who ven- 
tured through. There had been commercial houses here, anid itis: 
dozen places iron boxes and small safes had been routed out of the 
ruins and their fronts torn open by means of crowbars and other 
heavy tools. In some cases this had been done by the legitimate 
heirs to the property. In too many instances there were evidences 
of the alert industry of the looters and ghouls who had come 
only to prey upon the city of the dead. In the deep gray powder