ng pain from his nose and
mouth, the suffocation from his lungs.

By a miracle he had escaped being struck by the flying splinters of iron,
and, thanks to his strong heart, had escaped being killed by the shock of
the explosion. Not until the end of five minutes of mad struggling, in
which he behaved for all the world like a beheaded chicken, did he find
life tolerable again. The maximum of stifling and of agony passed, and,
although he was still weak and giddy, he tottered in the direction of the
house and of Nalasu. And there was no house and no Nalasu--only a debris
intermingled of both.

While the shells continued to shriek and explode, now near, now far,
Jerry investigated the happening. As surely as the house was gone, just
as surely was Nalasu gone. Upon both had descended the ultimate
nothingness. All the immediate world seemed doomed to nothingness. Life
promised only somewhere else, in the high hills and remote bush whither
the tribe had already fled. Loyal he was to his salt, to the master whom
he had obeyed so long, nigger that he was, who so long had fed him, and
for whom he had entertained a true affection. But this master no longer
was.

Retreat Jerry did, but he was not hasty in retreat. For a time he
snarled at every shell-scream in the air and every shell-burst in the
bush. But after a time, while the awareness of them continued
uncomfortably with him, the hair on his neck remained laid down and he
neither uttered a snarl nor bared his teeth.

And when he parted from what had been and which had ceased to be, not
like the bush dogs did he whimper and run. Instead, he trotted along the
path at a regular and dignified pace. When he emerged upon the main
path, he found it deserted. The last refugee had passed. The path,
always travelled from daylight to dark, and which he had so recently seen
glutted with humans, now in its emptiness affected him profoundly with
the impression of the endingness of all things in a perishing world. So
it was that he did not sit down under the banyan tree, but trotted along
at the far rear of the tribe.

With his nose he read the narrative of the flight. Only once did he
encounter what advertised its terror. It was an entire group annihilated
by a shell. There were: an old man of fifty, with a crutch because of
the leg which had been slashed off by a shark when he was a young boy; a
dead Mary with a dead babe at her breast and a dead child of three
cl