mething hit him a smashing blow on the side of his head, and the
entire North African sky blew up in a thunderous roar of sound!

When consciousness returned to Dawson his first hazy impression was that
he was floating about in the middle of a great sea of black ink. But no,
not everything was that black. At regular intervals a faint yellowish
orange glow appeared before his eyes. But before he could get a good
look at it the glow faded away out of sight. Instinctively he tried to
get his brain to function; to get it to figure out what everything was
all about. However, for a long time he somehow just couldn't force his
brain to make that effort. He simply lived in a world of hazy snatches
of thought, and inky darkness lighted now and then by a yellowish orange
glow.

Eventually, as though secret curtains had been pulled away inside his
head, memory came slipping back, and he began to discover and realize
things. The first realization was that he was hanging suspended in
mid-air and slowly swaying this way and that. The second realization was
that the darkness was the darkness of night. The third realization was
that there was a dull throbbing on the left side of his head. And the
fourth, and perhaps the most important realization of all, was that he
was dangling at the ends of the shroud lines of his parachute, which was
hopelessly fouled in the crooked and gnarled branches of a scrub tree.
By throwing his head way back he could look upward and see his fouled
'chute and the tree branches silhouetted against the billions of stars
that twinkled at him from high overhead. And when he looked down he saw
that rocky ground was not over three feet from the soles of his flying
boots.

That realization filled him with great joy, but it also made him gulp,
and caused beads of cold sweat to break out on his forehead. Never as
long as he lived would he be able to remember that he actually had
pulled the rip-cord ring of his parachute whether or not that flying bit
of Lockheed wreckage caught him on the side of the head. But he must
have done that little thing, and by the grace of God and Lady Luck he
had not been allowed to strike ground while still unconscious. To have
done so, to have hit ground without being prepared for the landing
shock would unquestionably have resulted in a couple of broken ankles,
if not legs. Particularly because of the rocky soil under him. However,
one chance in a billion had come to pass, and his jou