it seemed to him as though from afar off he could hear the
sound of a thousand muffled hammers beating upon an anvil; of a strange,
methodical disturbance in the air. He grasped the railing with one
hand and gazed upward with straining eyes. Just at that moment he saw
distinctly what appeared to be a flash of lightning in the sky,
followed by a report which sounded like a sharp clap of thunder.
Then instinctively he covered his eyes with his hands. From a dozen
places--one close at hand--a long, level stream of light seemed to shoot
out towards the clouds. There was one of them which came from near
the Carlton Hotel, which lit up the whole of the Pall Mall Arch with
startling distinctness, gave him a sudden vision of the Admiralty roof,
and, as he followed it up, brought a cry to his lips. Far away, beyond
even the limits of the quivering line of light, there was something
in the sky which seemed a little blacker than the cloud. Even while he
looked at it, from the Admiralty roof came a lurid flash, the hiss and
screech of a shell as it dashed upwards. And then the sleeping city
seemed suddenly to awake and the night to become hideous. Not fifty
yards away from him something fell in the Park, and all around him lumps
of gravel and clods of earth fell in a shower. A great elm tree fell
crashing into the railings close by his side. Then there was a deafening
explosion, the thunder of falling masonry, and a house by the side of
the arch broke suddenly into flames. A few moments later, a queer sight
amongst all these untoward and unexpected happenings, a fire engine
dashed under the arch, narrowly missing the broken fragments of brick
and stone, swung around, and a dozen fire-hoses commenced to play upon
the flaming building.

The darkness was over now, and the silence. There were houses on the
other side of the river on fire, and scarcely a moment passed without
the crash of a falling bomb. The air for a second or two was filled with
piteous shrieks from somewhere towards Charing-Cross, shrieks drowned
almost immediately by another tremendous explosion from further
north. Every now and then, looking upwards in the line of the long
searchlights, Thomson could distinctly see the shape of one of the
circling airships. Once the light flashed downwards, and between him and
Buckingham Palace he saw a great aeroplane coming head foremost down,
heard it strike the ground with a tremendous crash, heard the long
death cry, a cry whi