which were
blocks of houses in a village. He believed he must be in an aeroplane
contemplating the earth from a height of three thousand feet. Then he
raised the glasses to his eyes, following the direction of one of the
red lines, and saw enlarged in the circle of the glass a black bar,
somewhat like a heavy line of ink--the grove, the refuge of the foe.

"Whenever you say, Senator Lacour, we will begin," said the Commandant,
reaching the topmost notch of his courtesy. "Are you ready?"

Desnoyers smiled slightly. For what was his illustrious friend to
make himself ready? What difference could it possibly make to a mere
spectator, much interested in the novelty of the show? . . .

There sounded behind them numberless bells, gongs that called and gongs
that answered. The acoustic tubes seemed to swell out with the gallop
of words. The electric wire filled the silence of the room with the
palpitations of its mysterious life. The bland Chief was no longer
occupied with his guests. They conjectured that he was behind them, his
mouth at the telephone, conversing with various officials some distance
off. Yet the urbane and well-spoken hero was not abandoning for one
moment his candied courtesy.

"Will you be kind enough to tell me when you are ready to begin?" they
heard him saying to a distant officer. "I shall be much pleased to
transmit the order."

Don Marcelo felt a slight nervous tremor near one of his legs; it was
Lecour, on the qui vive over the approaching novelty. They were going
to begin firing; something was going to happen that he had never seen
before. The cannons were above their heads; the roughly vaulted roof
was going to tremble like the deck of a ship when they shot over it. The
room with its acoustic tubes and its vibrations from the telephones was
like the bridge of a vessel at the moment of clearing for action. The
noise that it was going to make! . . . A few seconds flitted by that
to them seemed unusually long . . . and then suddenly a sound like
a distant peal of thunder which appeared to come from the clouds.
Desnoyers no longer felt the nervous twitter against his knee. The
senator seemed surprised; his expression seemed to say, "And is that
all?" . . . The heaps of earth above them had deadened the report, so
that the discharge of the great machine seemed no more than the blow
of a club upon a mattress. Far more impressive was the scream of the
projectile sounding at a great height but displac