The Clockwork Universe Read Online Free PDF Page B

he said. “A woman might piss it out.”
    At that point, perhaps, the damage might still have been confined. But a gust of wind carried sparks and flame beyond Pudding Lane to the Star Inn on Fish Street Hill, where a pile of straw and hay in the courtyard caught fire.
    Everything conspired to create a disaster. For nearly a year London had been suffering through a drought. The wooden city was dry and poised to explode in flames, like kindling ready for the match. Tools to fight the blaze were almost nonexistent, and the warren of tiny, twisting streets made access for would-be firefighters nearly impossible in any case. (On his inspection tour the lord mayor found that he could not squeeze his coach into Pudding Lane.) Pumps to throw water on the flames were clumsy, weak contraptions, if they could be located in the first place and if someone could manage to connect them to a source of water. Instead firefighters formed lines and passed along buckets filled at the Thames. The contents of a leather bucket flung into an inferno vanished with a hiss and sizzle, like drops of water on a hot skillet.
    Making matters harder still, London was not just built of wood but built in the most dangerous way possible. Rickety, slap dash buildings leaned against one another like drunks clutching each other for support. On and on they twisted, an endless labyrinth of shops, tenements, and taverns with barely a gap to slow the flames. Even on the opposite sides of an alleyway, gables tottered so near together that anyone could reach out and grab the hand of someone in the garret across the way. And since this was a city of warehouses and shops, it was a city booby-trapped with heaps of coal, vats of oil, stacks of timber and cloth, all poised to stoke the flames.
    The only real way to fight the fire was to demolish the intact buildings in its path, in the hope of starving it of fuel. As the fire roared, the king himself pitched in to help with the demolition work, standing ankle-deep in mud and water, tearing at the walls with spade in hand. Slung over his shoulder was a pouch filled with gold guineas, prizes for the men working with him.
    Propelled by strong winds, the fire roared along and then split in two. One stream of flames headed into the heart of the city, the other toward the Thames and the warehouses that lined it. The river-bound fire leaped onto London Bridge, in those days covered with shops and tall, wooden houses. At the water’s edge, the flames reached heights of fifty feet. Panicky refugees stumbled through the mud and begged boatmen to carry them away.
    On the fire’s second night Pepys watched in shock from a barge on the Thames, smoke stinging his eyes, showers of sparks threatening to set his clothes afire. As he watched, the flames grew until they formed one continuous arch of fire that looked to be a mile long. “A horrid noise the flames made,” Pepys wrote, and the crackling flames were only one note in a devil’s chorus. People screamed in terror as they fled, blinded by smoke and ashes. House beams cracked like gunfire when they burned through. Hunks of roofs smashed to the ground with great, percussive thuds. Stones from church walls exploded, as if they had been flung into a furnace.
    Through the next day things grew worse. “God grant mine eyes may never behold the like, who now saw above ten thousand houses all in one flame,” wrote the diarist John Evelyn. “The noise and cracking and thunder of the impetuous flames, the shrieking of women and children, the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses and churches, was like a hideous storm . . . near two miles in length and one in breadth. Thus I left it, burning, a resemblance of Sodom or the Last Day.”
    * * *
    After four days, the wind finally weakened. For the first time, the demolition crews—who had resorted to blowing up houses with gunpowder—managed to corral the flames. As the fires burned