Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 6 (1925-12).djvu/85

throat a sound to break that awful silence. The buildings had dissolved and crumbled down. They were all the same, a terrible, twisted mass of wreckage that seemed about to shriek out in misery.

We were sick unto death following the cowering messboy, when he at length stopped before a great white mass of tumbled ruins and exclaimed in a hoarse voice:

"Here it is. The consulate."

To me it made little difference whether he was right or wrong.

There were no doors, no roofs. Nothing but parts of the tottering wall remained standing, and over all that ghastly ash. I clambered over a low gap in the ruin, and the ashes touching my hands were yet warm. The first sight that met my eyes made me shudder with horror.

Here the wall had only partly caved in, thus leaving a sort of shelter for what had once been a bathroom. The bathtub was intact, a huge affair, filled with water and cinders. The bather, a woman, lay floating among the ashes. The flesh had been cooked and now, after these many days, was dissolving. I turned away in disgust. I can see those bulging and blistered eyes today.

The coffin was deposited among the cinders and awaited the consul's bones. I knew the consul was a white man, but in that charnel-house there was nothing white save bones and ashes. With our spades we stirred that putrid mass. The bodies were so commingled and charred that recognition of any particular one was impossible.

Suddenly I stirred up some pieces of cloth entirely whole and uninjured. They were napkins. I thought if all the napkins in all the American consulates of the world were put in one heap, there would not be this many. I turned up the edge of one, read some words worked thereon and hurriedly covered them up before my comrades saw what I was about. These were the words: "HOTEL DE FRANCE."

I picked up a charred skeleton and said to my men as I placed it in the coffin:

"I put some bones in this casket. Whose are they?"

"They are the consul's bones, they replied with one voice, husky and dry.

These had been the first words uttered since our arrival.

The American sailor is a discreet man. Each and every one grasped my meaning as plainly as if I had explained. They, as well as I, realized the utter hopelessness of seeking farther the body of the true American consul.

"Do you understand, Stephen?" I said to the messboy.

"I understand. Those are the consul's bones," he muttered.

As four of my men stooped to lift the heavy coffin, the dense cloud above descended upon us and I saw them but dimly. A hot current of nauseating air rushed upon us and I felt the perspiration burst from every pore as my lungs struggled for the oxygen they must have. Stephen fell groveling at my feet, grasped my legs and screamed in a wild and husky voice:

"It is the end! I am smothering! Let us flee!"

Then the long pent-up fury of the elements broke—the floodgates of heaven opened—a million ripping thunders shook the earth till we trembled—lurid sheets of flame-lightning rent the cloud to shreds—the waters fell as if the sea had been dropped upon our heads. I could not see one of my comrades. I held my hands over my nose and mouth to keep from drowning.

For one solid hour the torrents poured from the growling heavens.