The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [557]
He was no more than sixty yards from the protection of the green banks of earth by the fort but moving in slow motion. He ran and ran but the fort seemed to come no closer; the muscles of his thighs no longer obeyed him. Half-way across the intervening open space he stumbled and fell on the gravel. He could no longer hear the engines but looking up at last he saw that one of the bombers flying very low was almost on top of him and appeared to be hovering over him like a bird of prey, blotting out the sun. Getting to his feet he staggered forward again in desperation and finding himself on the edge of a grassy bank of earth he hurled himself over it and tumbled head over heels down and down into the shady depths of a gully full of sand and stones. And as he did so he was followed by a great tidal wave of sound that swept over his head and tore savagely at the flag hanging limply from the flag-staff a few yards away.
He lay there quaking for some moments with his head in his hands, flinching as one aeroplane after another roared overhead, each one followed by a series of resonant explosions which shook the ground and created a miniature landslide of pebbles a few inches in front of his nose. Simultaneously with the explosions there came what might have been the pattering of fingernails on a metal table, very thin and trivial compared with the violent beating of big drums and the grinding of masonry. Machine-guns!
Again and again he heard the crump of falling bombs. Some of them fell very close, and with each bomb there was the same dreadful shudder of the earth and a trickle of gravel by his face. A spider, horribly agile, galloped away in a panic. When he looked up he could see that the godowns along Swettenham and Victoria Piers were blazing briskly and beyond, on the peaceful and shining waters towards the mainland, smoke was rising from several of the anchored vessels, swelling from slender trunks into canopies that hung over them, giving them the appearance of monstrous elms.
For some minutes, while he recovered a little from the effort he had made, he lay where he was, thinking of nothing; then he climbed unsteadily out of his refuge. Without considering where he was going, though perhaps with some dazed notion that he might escape from this catastrophe by taking the electric tram which ran from the railway jetty along the Dato Kramat Road to Ayer Itam Village, he began to wander back the way he had come. But, of course, such an escape was out of the question: even if there had been anyone left to drive a tram the tracks were cratered and the overhead wires lay tangled on the ground amid the rubble of masonry.
Despite the crackle of burning buildings and the shouts and screams of those who had been injured, to Dupigny it suddenly seemed very quiet as he retraced his steps towards the Railway Jetty. It seemed that it was only a moment earlier that he had been running in the opposite direction; yet of the crowds through which he had had to force his way there was no sign: they had melted away mysteriously leaving only, dotted on the pavement here and there, bundles of clothes: from many of these bundles, however, blood was flowing.
One of the bundles was of pure white muslin and from it there issued such a lake of blood that Dupigny found himself