the openings of his
hole being closed up, made this refuge intolerable.

Above him the tornado was still raging. A peal like thunder boomed above
his head, and then came the crash of a landslide. Another projectile
must have fallen upon the building. He heard shrieks of agony, yells
and precipitous steps on the floor above him. Perhaps the shell, in its
blind fury, had blown to pieces many of the dying in the salons.

Fearing to remain buried in his retreat, he bounded up the cellar stairs
two steps at a time. As he scudded across the first floor, he saw the
sky through the shattered roofs. Along the edges were hanging sections
of wood, fragments of swinging tile and furniture stopped halfway in
its flight. Crossing the hall, he had to clamber over much rubbish. He
stumbled over broken and twisted iron, parts of beds rained from the
upper rooms into the mountain of debris in which he saw convulsed limbs
and heard anguished voices that he could not understand.

He leaped as he ran, feeling the same longing for light and free air as
those who rush from the hold to the deck of a shipwreck. While sheltered
in the darkness more time had elapsed than he had supposed. The sun was
now very high. He saw in the garden more corpses in tragic and grotesque
postures. The wounded were doubled over with pain or lying on the ground
or propping themselves against the trees in painful silence. Some had
opened their knapsacks and drawn out their sanitary kits and were trying
to care for their cuts. The infantry was now firing incessantly. The
number of riflemen had increased. New bands of soldiers were entering
the park--some with a sergeant at their head, others followed by an
officer carrying a revolver at his breast as though guiding his men
with it. This must be the infantry expelled from their position near
the river which had come to reinforce the second line of defense. The
mitrailleuses were adding their tac-tac to the cracks of the fusileers.

The hum of the invisible swarms was buzzing incessantly. Thousands of
sticky horse-flies were droning around Desnoyers without his even seeing
them. The bark of the trees was being stripped by unseen hands; the
leaves were falling in torrents; the boughs were shaken by opposing
forces, the stones on the ground were being crushed by a mysterious
foot. All inanimate objects seemed to have acquired a fantastic life.
The zinc spoons of the soldiers, the metallic parts of their outfit, the
p