all this the regular dull sob-like throb of the engines. Furniture,
bedding, black helmets, ladders, shining buttons, illuminated faces,
wheels, ropes, tarpaulin, strange instruments; Mogens rushed into
their midst, over, under it all, forward to the house.

The facade was brightly illuminated by the flames from the burning
factory, smoke issued from between the tiles of the roof and rolled
out of the open windows of the first story. Within the fire rumbled
and crackled. There was a slow groaning sound, that turned into a
rolling and crashing, and ended in a dull boom. Smoke, sparks, and
flames issued in torment out of all the openings of the house. And
then the flames began to play and crackle with redoubled strength and
redoubled clearness. It was the middle part of the ceiling of the
first floor that fell. Mogens with both hands seized a large
scaling-ladder which leaned against the part of the factory which was
not yet in flames. For a moment he held it vertically, but then it
slipped away from him and fell over toward the councilor's house where
it broke in a window-frame on the second story. Mogens ran up the
ladder, and in through the opening. At first he had to close his eyes
on account of the pungent wood-smoke, and the heavy suffocating fumes
which rose from the charred wood that the water had reached took his
breath away. He was in the dining-room. The living-room was a huge
glowing abyss; the flames from the lower part of the house, now and
then, almost reached up to the ceiling; the few boards that had
remained hanging when the floor fell burned in brilliant
yellowish-white flames; shadows and the gleam of flames flooded over
the walls; the wall-paper here and there curled up, caught fire, and
flew in flaming tatters down into the abyss; eager yellow flames
licked their way up on the loosened moldings and picture-frames.
Mogens crept over the ruins and fragments of the fallen wall towards