The tower surmounting it was
split by an explosion from above downward, but the fissure ended at the
very point where the icon is found; the explosion of 500 pounds of powder
did not break even the glass which covers the image or the crystal of the
lamp which burns before it. Along the walls of the arsenal are the cannon
taken from the enemy, and in the arsenal are other trophies, including the
camp-bed of Napoleon.
Russian accounts from eye-witnesses of the conflagration are few--in fact,
there exists none in writing. People who witnessed the catastrophe could
not write. What we possess are collections from verbal accounts given by
servants, serfs, who had told the events to their masters. Nobody of
distinction had remained in Moscow, none of the nobility, the clergy, the
merchants. The persons from whom the following accounts are given were the
nun Antonine, a former slave of the Syraxine family, the little peddler
Andreas Alexieef, a woman, Alexandra Alexievna Nazarot, an old slave of the
family Soimonof by the name of Basilli Ermolaevitch, the wife of a pope,
Maria Stepanova, the wife of another pope, Helene Alexievna. A Russian
lady has collected what she had learned from these humble people,
the eye-witnesses of the catastrophe, and published it, pseudonym,
in some Russian journal. All these people had minutely narrated their
experiences to her at great length, not omitting any detail which
concerned themselves or circumstances which caused their surprise, and
they all gave the dates, the hours which they had tenaciously kept in
their memory for sixty years, for it was in the year 1872 when the
Russian lady interrogated them.
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