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.