-

And my laugh awakens me, sounding ghastly under the dull smoke; and the
tumult and ringing and roar of the combat springs up around me again.

And now, over the banging of metal and the clashing of armour on armour
and the sounds of the trampling and breaking of wood and the howling,
comes another sound--surely my Lord Snore's axe! But the blows are so
quick, there is something awesome, unnatural, in the blows of a man
falling so fast.

And now I am aware of a change that has come in the fight. I no longer
see the ghost-figures passing, dim in the smoke. The sound of the
fighting comes from out in the hall. I wait, peering into the smoke.
Slowly it lifts from above the table--lifts, growing dimmer.

Outlines come out of the distance. The opposite wall of the hall looms
up into the darkness. The candles glimmer and show through the smoke. I
look down the hall. A grey mass, moving indistinctly, and the sound of a
great continuous crashing coming from somewhere within it.

The smoke lifts more; bodies of men on the floor come out, and I can see
the dim tapestries waving on the walls; and now the great sound of the
crashing comes louder.

The smoke lifts yet more, it is pouring out of the windows and under the
roof; the walls spring out into distinctness; and I see, plain, the end
of the hall.

A crowd of men struggling and falling over each other against the great
door; the flashing of armour, swords thrown in the air, clenched hands
raised and falling, the end of the hall full of tumult of arms and legs
and bodies, as the men rush and surge over each other against the
outlet.

But, dominating all in its hugeness, striking the men before it, making
a glory with its flying axe--enormous, irresistible, clothed in red,
seeming to shake the air with the roar through its skin, yet utterly
silent--Lord Snore, gone mad with the combat, striking with the strength
of a falling tree--sweeping out the hall before him!

The door is open! The men pile up on the threshold; the door grows
high--is darkened--is full. Grows open--men whirl along the floor under the
axe--the wave breaks, it recedes, it runs away into the corners, it
dissolves and runs away in foam--the door is empty.

The last of the smoke rolls around under the roof, the walls rock with
the reverberation, and the sounds of our voices calling to one another
are lost in the echoes. The hall heaves, the sounds die, going out with
the smoke under the roof; and t