Marpasse had a glimpse of Denise clinging to her horse that had reared in terror. Gaillard had left Isoult, and was trying to clear a path with his sword, making his horse swerve to and fro in the press. Then Marpasse had no sense left in her, but the sense of falling, of being thrown hither and thither, of being trampled on and hurt. A horse crashed to the ground close to her and lay still, and with the blind instinct of the moment, Marpasse flung herself down and huddled close under the beast’s body as an Arab shelters behind a camel when a dust storm sweeps the desert. Yet with swiftness and tumult and fierce anguish the storm passed, and was gone. Marpasse found herself peering up over the horse’s body, and looking at a splendid sky against which dark figures struggled together as on the edge of an abyss. Marpasse scrambled up, wondering how she had come out of the storm so easily, and stood and stared stupidly about her, dazed for the moment by the violence of it all. A tempest of horsemen was rolling away over the hillside like a grey cloud curling over a mountain. Broken bodies lay everywhere, some still squirming like worms that have been trodden under foot; others motionless, contorted, and grotesque, like bodies thrown at random from a high tower. And where life and noise and movement had been but a few minutes before, a slow silence seemed to ooze in and to stagnate under the melancholy of the coming night. Marpasse’s wits came back to her, and she looked round for any sign of those who had been with her a few moments ago. Gaillard had gone, Denise also, like people swept off a rock by an ocean wave. Looking about her, Marpasse saw a white horse lying dead upon the hillside, and something that moved half under and half beside it, with the whimpering cry of a child. Marpasse stumbled forward, for one foot had been bruised, and found Death sitting upon the carcase of the white horse. Isoult lay there with the beast’s body upon her legs, and her back broken. She could stretch out her hands to Marpasse, with a shuddering spasm of cursing that was piteous and futile. “Curse Simon, and his bulls, curse Gaillard, the great coward! I am done for, and this white hog, this devil’s bitch lies on my legs like a rock. Hold off, great fool. Do I want to be pulled about when my back’s broken, and my ribs are pricking my liver.” Marpasse tried to drag her clear of the horse, but Isoult’s screams and curses sobered her. She saw that Isoult was near her end, crushed like a wild cat in the steel jaws of a trap. The girl, too, had the spiteful valour of a cat, and pushed Marpasse’s hands away when she tried to fondle her. “None of your spittle,” she said, biting her lips with the anguish in her; “it is jolly, I tell you, to be trampled into the dirt! Just the sort of end I was made for. Who cares? Oh, yes, I shall go straight to hell.”