Nalasu sat down abruptly.  It was his first shell, and it was a thousand times more terrible than he had imagined.  It was a rip-snorting, sky-splitting sound as of a cosmic fabric being torn asunder between the hands of some powerful god.  For all the world it was like the roughest tearing across of sheets that were thick as blankets, that were broad as the earth and wide as the sky.

Not only did he sit down just outside his door, but he crouched his head to his knees and shielded it with the arch of his arms.  And Jerry, who had never heard shell-fire, much less imagined what it was like, was impressed with the awfulness of it.  It was to him a natural catastrophe such as had happened to the Arangi when she was flung down reeling on her side by the shouting wind.  But, true to his nature, he did not crouch down under the shriek of that first shell.  On the contrary, he bristled his hair and snarled up with menacing teeth at whatever the thing was which was so enormously present and yet invisible to his eyes.

Nalasu crouched closer when the shell burst beyond, and Jerry snarled and rippled his hair afresh.  Each repeated his actions with each fresh shell, for, while they screamed no more loudly, they burst in the jungle more closely.  And Nalasu, who had lived a long life most bravely in the midst of perils he had known, was destined to die a coward out of his fear of the thing unknown, the chemically propelled missile of the white masters.  As the dropping shells burst nearer and nearer, what final self-control he possessed left him.  Such was his utter panic that he might well have bitten his veins and howled.  With a lunatic scream, he sprang to his feet and rushed inside the house as if forsooth its grass thatch could protect his head from such huge projectiles.  He collided with the door-jamb, and, ere Jerry could follow him, whirled around in a part circle into the centre of the floor just in time to receive the next shell squarely upon his head.

Jerry had just gained the doorway when the shell exploded.  The house went into flying fragments, and Nalasu flew into fragments with it.  Jerry, in the doorway, caught in the out-draught of the explosion, was flung a score of feet away.  All in the same fraction of an instant, earthquake, tidal wave, volcanic eruption, the thunder of the heavens and the fire-flashing of an electric bolt from the sky smote him and smote consciousness out of him.

He had no conception of how long he lay.  Five minutes passed before his legs made their first spasmodic movements, and, as he stumbled to his feet and rocked giddily, he had no thought of the passage of time.  He had no thought about time at all.  As a matter of course, his own idea, on which he proceeded to act without being aware of it, was that, a part of a second before, he had been struck a terrific blow magnified incalculable times beyond the blow of a stick at a nigger’s hands.