panted up the steep slope with terror stamped on
their faces.

Men with household furniture heaped camelwise on their shoulders
trudged stoically over the rough cobbles, with the flame of the fire
bronzing their faces into the outlines of a gargoyle. One patriotic
son of Nippon labored painfully up Dupont street with the crayon
portrait of the emperor of Japan on his back.

While this zone of fire was swiftly gnawing its way through Kearney
street and up the hill, another and even more terrible segment of the
conflagration was being stubbornly fought at the corner of Golden Gate
avenue and Polk street. There exhausted firemen directed the feeble
streams from two hoses upon a solid block of streaming flame.

The engines pumped the supply from the sewers. Notwithstanding this
desperate stand, the flames progressed until they had reached Octavia
street.

Like a sickle set to a field of grain the fiery crescent spread around
the southerly end of the west addition up to Oak and Fell streets,
along Octavia. There one puny engine puffed a single stream of water
upon the burning mass, but its efforts were like the stabbing of a
pigmy at a giant.

All the district bounded by Octavia, Golden Gate avenue, and Market
street was a blackened ruin. One picked his way through the fallen
walls on Van Ness avenue as he would cross an Arizona mesa. It was an
absolute ruin, gaunt and flame lighted.

From the midst rose the great square wall of St. Ignatius college,
standing like another ruined Acropolis in dead Athens.

Behind the gaunt specter of what had once been the city hall a
blizzard of flame swept back into the gore between Turk and Market
streets. Peeled of its heavy stone facing like a young leek that is
stripped of its wrappings, the dome of the city hall rose spectral
against the nebulous background of sparks.

From its summit looked down the goddess of justice, who had kept her
pedestal even while the ones of masonry below her feet had been
toppled to the earth in huge blocks the size of a freight car.

Through the gaunt iron ribs and the dome the red glare suffusing the
whole northern sky glinted like the color of blood in a hand held to
the sun.

At midnight the Hibernian bank was doomed, for from the frame
buildings west of it there was being swept a veritable maelstrom of
sheet flame that leaped toward it in giant strides. Not a fireman was
in sight.

Across the street amid the smoke stood the new postoffic