 of the shadows, a shelf of cacti was bristling with needles, twisting prone stems into a tangled nest of snakes. And beyond that many other shapes waited in ambush for Hemo, who guessed at their presence in the darker clumps distinguishable in the greater darkness, his fears restraining him from going any farther.
 All he needed to do to gain access to the flask of alcohol, when he came back, was to lift the catch. He took the three-quarters for himself and poured the remainder into the orang's dish, who, not educated by miss Betty, did not know how to pour drink straight down his throat, scooping it in his hand instead. Tipsy, but not satisfied, he searched some more, finding in the messy pile of objects a carboy of oil, which he tilted towards his lips, and dropped so abruptly in suddenly drawing away from it in disgust that it broke into pieces. The nauseating liquid spread through the small drains used in washing out the cages and the hallway, soaked into the pine flooring and litter, when Hemo, bumping against the long fire-iron which he saw the keeper use to rake up the coals, in his imitative rage he grabbed the tool and rummaged around in the heater with it. When the first bits of the hot coals fell outside the heater, trails of fire immediately sprung up everywhere.
Between the two furrows on either side of the hallway, he dragged the orang, stopping only to turning in glee towards his work. The oil, the slope of the drains directed towards them was catching up to them; a large vestibule offer a closer shelter to them than did the greenhouse. They pushed, at the back, a very tall doorway with swinging doors, and thought themselves free. They were only in their future palace, huge but with no way out, and of which they tried in vain to loosen the iron bars. Furious at this failed escape, Hemo nook vengeance in a cruel inspiration. He went back into the hallway, pulled, across the line of fire, the bolts of four of the cages that had been closed no better than his, and running back to his companion, at the top of their huge perch, waited to cheer on the ferocious battles and all of the spectacle which, with the help of chance, he had so ably prepared.
The first victim of his malice was a poor little chevrotain which one had isolated from the park in which he belonged to a family of eight to ten individuals, to protect him, one leg already broken, from the unappeased rancour of an old buck whose lovemaking he interfered with. The new layout not allowing him to be put anywhere else, left him neighboured with a panther who, in spite of several dividers being interposed, scented him, and whose mewing kept him pinned to his litter, trembling, taking up as little space as possible, his limb wrapped up in a splint as well as his others bent under his stomach. Forgetting his fear, he came along, limping, to troat before the bars of the monkey palace, and his doe was already answering him from far away in the park, when he expired, his flanks and neck torn open by the panther which had followed him.
Two lions next door did not bother moving except to turn their backs to the fire and immediately take up their sphinx- like poses again. A calming of nerves flattening their hindquarters, they rejoiced at their ease, calm except for a few twitches of pleasure at the base of the tail, and did not sharpen their nails, to face the danger and leap, in bounds of several metres, right into the greenhouse, until the heat became unbearable. Upon their roaring out, as if at a signal, all at once the hallway rang out with the cries of all its denizens, with all the howls of a sinking ark. The fire, as if fanned by these cries of terror, burst out more violently. The large cage in turn was on fire, where everything seemed to have been set out to facilitate the fire: the contractor's equipment thrown in haphazardly, sheets of flooring piled up in a corner, wood chips left over from carpentry covering the ground, scaffolding poles and platforms leaning on the perch, pots of coloured paint, and barrels of thinner and oil, for the painters. And if, in the hallways, the fire smouldered without one being able to see much from outside, here it formed an open air pyre that lit up the surroundings, scattering its sparks over the sleeping creatures scattered about the gardens. Aviaries became animated like a chicken coop at the approach of a fox. From the edge of their deep pool the sea-lions, believing themselves back in the land of the aurora borealis, dove happily to rise back up every minute and, just above the surface, salute the sudden wavering glow with short barks. Blinded by the smoke, the panther left its meal, followed the inside of the bars or sometimes drew up against them, the black velvet of his coat gaining the lustre of magnificent moir‚ patterns, as crimson as the blood which his still dripped from his chops. And in all the walkways, help was arriving, at the sound --- sinister in the night --- of the trumpet and drums.
Upon seeing the panther, the museum's employees cried out that the big cats had escaped, and were panicked into headlong flight, which had at least one tangible benefit, it left the way open for the firemen. One of the latter, immediately close enough to the beast that it could hope to strike him with its claws, threw an axe at it through the bars, missing it, but, getting closer, the fire and its fury bringing it back towards him, this time he split its head open to the neck. Another, resolved to get into the hallway, which he thought to be the seat of the fire, by way of the yet intact greenhouses, cut, his safety light in one hand, his pickaxe in the other, an easy breach in the windowed structure, only to be confronted by a lion's mouth, before which he drew back. The cowards decidedly had not overstated the danger, the big cats had indeed been released.
The officers pushed back the curious and met briefly. They just had to keep the fire from spreading, and to stop the beasts from taking their carnage or at least their disorder into the city. Cordoning off the area, men with rifles cocked, finger on the trigger, were ready to bring down the surviving beasts when the walls would collapse. At the same moment terrible cries drew everyone's eyes to the top of the monkey enclosure. It was Hemo and the orang who had been forgotten there. Asphyxiated no doubt, the latter tumbled down, bouncing off the bars, and in spite of the fact that they were heated to a brownish red, clenched them and bit them in pain, leaving behind torn shreds of his hands and lips, howling lamentably until the very moment he fell, finally dead, into the blazing mass where his flesh sizzled, his skull exploded, and where his large, fierce body was soon no more than a mass of blackened axle grease stinking of melted fat.
But Hemo, who, held onto by him, had had to knock him out with a punch to the face in order not to follow him, still had not given up. The perch, half burnt away at the base was weakening, so he took to the arches and cross-braces supporting the top of the building. Swinging down the trapeze which the masons, whom he had disturbed in their handling of their ladders, had attached by the end with a lozenge of wire to the structure supporting the glassed over ceiling, and sliding straight along the horizontal bar, he sent it careening like a swing. The flames were almost touching him, but the wind from his rocking to and fro blew them back, to the front, to the back, farther away at each successive and faster pass,. He appeared above them and amidst them like the demon which emerges invulnerable from the bubbling cauldron in which witches reduce aspics and toads, and the roots of euphorbia and mandrake to an unguent which they apply upon the Sabbath. The crowd, recognising him, called out his name, when a bizarre scene suddenly quieted a thousand voices at once, the scene of Jan Maas arriving from the docks, pushing aside the guards, falling to his knees before the monkey enclosure, and his arms extended towards Hemo, crying and calling him his son. And the sympathy of a sincere pity soon replaced the laughter and mockery which had at first risen at every hand. As soon as they saw how thin he was, how haggard he looked, how downtrodden and fevered the stranger was, and how he tried to force his way through the ranks of the firemen, who held him back, they knew him to be insane. For what party had the devil that night let the animals out of their pens and the insane out of their asylums?. Two men dragged him off. A poor angry sheep, in tears, he plead with them, begged that he be allowed to save his child, since the firemen themselves refused to do so. And as if feeling him to be so weak, posing so little danger, the hands around him would loosen, allowing him to throw himself back on his knees and cry out anew: "Hemo! Hemo! My son!"
At this distinctive voice, Hemo stops short on the trapeze, jumps to the bottom of the cage, and in spite