atre, as the force of the explosion passed beneath the
buildings in a surging of the ground on which they stood, a slow wave
rolling southwards, without a backward draw.

The lavatory door had jammed, as doors will jam in earthquakes. Saxham
tore it open, and the three shirt-sleeved, ensanguined men ran through the
theatre, strewn with the debris from the roof, and through the double
glazed doors communicating with the passage, populous with patients who
should have been in bed, pursued by nurses as pale and shaken as their
stampeding charges. The rear of the Hospital faces North, and they ran
down a corridor full of dust, ending in more glazed doors, and tore out
upon the back stoep, wide and roomy, and full of deck chairs and wicker
lounges.

"Do ye see it? Ten thousand salted South African deevils! Do ye no' see
it?" the Surgeon-Major yelled, pointing to a monstrous milk-white
soap-bubble-shaped cloud that slowly rose up in the hot blue sky to the
North and hung there, sullenly brooding.

"What is it, Major?" shouted Saxham, for behind them the Hospital was full
of clamour. Nurses and dressers were running out into the grounds to
listen and question and conjecture, the barely reclaimed veld beyond the
palings was black with hurrying, shouting men, bandoliered, and carrying
guns of every kind and calibre, from the venerable gaspipe of the native
and the aged but still useful Martini-Henry of the citizen, to the
Lee-Metford repeating-carbine, and the German magazine rifle of latest
delivery to the troops of Imperial Majesty at Berlin. Men were clustered
like bees on the flat tin roofs of the sheds at the Railway Works; men had
climbed the signal-posts and were looking out from them over the sea of
veld; the Volunteers garrisoning the Cemetery had poured from their
temporary huts and dug-out shelters, and were massed on the top of their
sand-bag mounds. A fair, handsome Staff officer, the younger of the two
men who had accompanied the Colonel, went by at a tearing gallop, mounted
on a fine grey charger, and followed by an orderly, while the pot-hat and
truncheon of a scared native constable emerged timidly from the gaping
jaws of a rusty water-cistern, long dismissed from Hospital use, and
exiled to the open with other rubbish waiting transference to the
scrap-heap; and far out upon the railway-line that vanished in the
yellowing sea of veld an unseen engine screeched and screeched....

The Chief, in his pet post of