A great square of colored cloths in the sunlight--from twelve to fifteen thousand human beings listening to a man who cried out against violence, who cried out that _Sarkar_ couldn’t hurt his children--suddenly being ground in the great crush of Fear, being sprayed with rifle fire--blanks, of course--but to a result almost as deadly, for the people were destroying each other. They didn’t mean to, but they were trampling each other to death. Thus his mind viewed and reviewed--all this in a matter of seconds. Now Mr. Cobden saw something he didn’t understand. Down in the _maidan_ on the ground, not fifty feet away--a giant Sikh in white turban, running forward with raised hands, like a messenger--a close-up possibly for Dicky’s eyes alone--suddenly halted, spun and slapped limply to the ground with a curving fling. A glorious fall, if it had been a bit of acting--the fall a man makes when a bullet hits him. But Dicky was quite possessed with the idea that the soldiers were firing blanks. At this point, an English officer roared at his Gurkhas, who apparently had been firing high. His words were in vernacular, but the American saw the little dark men shorten their range. Thus it dawned upon him slowly, as if he were a very stupid man, that Fyatt was punishing Amritsar indeed--in fact, that the General was making a day of it. Also at the same time it dawned upon him that the public square was walled. He had seen the wall before, partly formed of buildings, but it hadn’t properly registered in connection with the words of the twisted ascetic of Cawnpore. Now he knew also that the several narrow throats of the walled square, none so wide as the _kucha_ through which he had entered, had become points of intensified death, because the great throng had divided to crush itself against these impossible apertures. The English officers appeared to be directing the fire of the soldiers toward these points where the maddened masses were most dense. Almost directly across the square the wall was low, less than six feet. Hundreds were jammed against it, but their bodies were so locked by the pressure from behind that no one could climb or be pushed over into safety. The Gurkhas looked like monkey men. They stamped queerly as they pumped. They were being told what to do and were in a great concentration to obey exactly. They emptied their magazines, each man taking his own time, and halted to fill them again, carefully avoiding with their fingers the burning metal of the barrels, as they refilled and fired. An English civilian, an elderly man, face livid, bumped Cobden’s wounded shoulder, as he lurched past, muttering: “My God! I can’t watch this.”