Espion--espion!_"

Pistol shots next--and rough cries--and a pounding charge of feet....
Right into my arms he floundered, and I tackled him and fell with him to
the cobbles and fought him there blindly, feeling for his throat. This
lasted but a moment. Gendarmes tore us apart, in a brief crossing flash
of electric-torches--and I caught just one glimpse of a bare
bullet-head, of a bloated, discolored face, of prominent staring eyes,
maddened by fear. There could be no mistake. It was our little man of
the Pantagruelian banquet. We had watched him eating his last fabulous
meal--his farewell to Egypt.

And that is all I just then clearly remember.... I am told that nine
bombs fell in a sweeping circle throughout this district; one of them,
in the very courtyard of the War Office; one of them--of 300
kilos--perhaps a square from where we stood. There was a rush past of
hurtling fragments--glass, chimney-tiles, chips of masonry, _que
sais-je_?--and even this I report only because I have been credibly so
informed.

What next I experienced was pain, unlocalized at first, yet somehow
damnably concentrated: pure, white-hot essence of pain. And through the
stiff hell of it I was, and was not, aware of someone--some one--some
_one_--murmuring love and pity and mortal anguish....

"Ambo--you wouldn't leave me--not you! Not you, Ambo--not alone...."

The pain dimmed off from me in an ebbing, dull-red wave; great coils of
palpable darkness swirled down upon me to smother me; I struggled to
rise from beneath them--fling them off.... From an infinite distance, a
woman's cry threaded through them, like a needle through mufflings of
wool, and pricked me to an instant, a single instant, of clear
consciousness. I opened my eyes on Susan's; I strove to answer them,
tell her I understood. Susan says that I did answer them--that I even
smiled. But I can feel back now only to a vast sinking away, depth under
depth under depth, down--down--down--down....

XI

The rest, however, I thank God, is not yet silence; though it is high
time to make an end of this long and all too faulty record.

They did various things to me at the hospital, from time to time; they
removed hard substances from me that were distinctly out of place in my
interior; they also removed certain portions of my authentic
anatomy--three fingers of my left hand, among others, and my left leg to
the knee. This was not in itself agreeable, and I shall always regret
the