Gaëlo had anchored his vessel at a short distance from one of the woody islets, washed by the river. Lodbrog fell heels over head into the water between the _holker_ and the nearby shore. With one bound the giant leaped out of the river, which was deep and rapid at that spot, and gained the shore, where he ran about shouting: "To St. Denis! To St Denis!" The frenzy that possessed the giant increased ten-fold the man's prodigious strength. He uprooted a twenty-foot poplar, and armed with the tree as with a mace, smote and crushed the other trees within his reach. The largest branches flew into splinters, the trunks broke in two, and still the furious vertigo of the colossus was on the increase. Not far from the shore stood the ruins of a house still partly covered by its roof; its walls arrested for a moment the demented course of the berserker. But the obstacle redoubled his rage. The trunk of the poplar served him for a ram. Its repeated blows broke through a portion of the lower wall, which thereupon came tumbling down with a great crash. Held up by the iron work in the opposite wall, a portion of the roof still remained in place. The giant clambered over the debris, grasped the beams of the roof with both hands and shook them furiously, ever bellowing: "To St. Denis! To St. Denis!" At last the beams yielded, and the worm-eaten roof, still partly covered with tiles, sank down upon Lodbrog with a deafening crash. For an instant the raging maniac disappeared under a cloud of dust, but presently reappeared unscathed from the falling timber and tiles. His casque and iron armor had protected him. He mounted the heap of ruins, looked around, and seeing nothing more to destroy, descended, pulled up the joists and beams, lifted up enormous stones and hurled them about with the irresistible force of those engines of war that are called catapults. Suddenly the berserker was heard to emit a roar like that of a lion; he raised his powerful arms heavenward, his body became rigid; for a moment he remained motionless like a gigantic iron statue, and then, like a colossus about to tumble from its base, swayed for an instant in air, dropped to the ground and rolled like a solid block from the top of the heap of ruins down to its foot, where he lay prone, seemingly as inanimate as a corpse. Gaëlo and the Northman pirates were not amazed at the frenzy of Lodbrog. They knew well that many a Northman mariner was subject to these frightful fits, frightful like the fury of the insane, a sort of epilepsy peculiar to the berserkers, with whom the anticipation or the ardor of battle, anger or drunkenness brought on the spell. Simon Large-Ears and Robin Jaws, however, now witnessed the spectacle for the first time; they gazed at it with surprise and affright. Finally, seeing from the distance that Lodbrog lay unconscious and rigid amidst the wreck that he had wrought, Simon cried: "He is now fortunately dead! We have nothing more to fear!"