astily snatching up a burning torch from the altar with a couple of
vigorous bounds he approached the smelting-furnace. Twenty bayonets and
a long axe in the hands of Juon Tare were raised against him--and he was
unarmed.

But it was not to the door he wished to get. With a spring sideways he
reached the huge vat filled with brandy, threw the burning torch down in
front of it and placing his muscular shoulders against the vat, with a
desperate exertion of strength scattered its contents on to the floor of
the cavern from end to end.

In an instant the whole cavern was in flames!

The floor was of stone so that it could not absorb the spirit as it
leaked out and it flashed up as it caught the flame of the torch close
at hand. It spread rapidly like a lake of fire that has burst its dams.

The blue spirit-flame filled the whole of the empty cavern with a pale,
ghastly glare, the air, the empty space itself seemed to burst into
flame. Hundreds of torches, burnt down to their very roots, flickered
luridly in the midst of this blue fire of hell, and the heaped-up fire
works,--the Bengali pyramids and the rockets and crackers--flamed,
fizzled and banged about in the midst of the terrible heat. And in the
thick of this infernal blaze black figures, like the souls of the
Accursed, were running frantically about, howling, shrieking and
toppling over one another and seeking a refuge on the higher rocks
whither the flames, spreading through the air, leaped after them. Juon
Tare lost his eyesight in the flames. The others tried to find a refuge
in the aqueduct running through the cavern, but the pursuing alcohol
rushed after them like a living cataract of fire. Everyone seemed bound
to perish at this hellish marriage feast.

Only two people did not lose their presence of mind; only two knew what
ought to be done, and one of these was Fatia Negra. When the armed
soldiers scattered from before the door of the smelting-furnace, he had
boldly waded through the burning spirit; he knew very well that it could
not set fire to clothing immediately and he took care to hold his hands
in front of his eyes to save himself from being blinded. He tore the
door open and hastily vanished through it.

The other was Anicza, who, when she saw that in the hundred-fold
confusion everyone had lost his head and was running desperately to
certain death, quickly snatched up an axe, rushed to the gigantic beer
vats and staved in their bottoms. The neu