Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/391

Rh at this recall, Laurent turned toward the roadstead.

At the moment when the clock struck the first stroke of the hour, he heard a series of little detonations go off with ever increasing rapidity at the cartridge plant, and as he gave up trying to count them, a shock plowed through his legs, the soil bent and unbent beneath his feet like a spring-board and threw him, with an involuntary force, a few feet away.

A thunder comparable to that of all the cannons in all the forts united in a single battery broke his iympanum and made the blood gush from his ears. At the same moment a part of the cartridge plant—alas, the workrooms of the children:—shook and was rent asunder like a house of cards, and, huddled and thrown together in a white spout, leaped and liquified toward heaven.

It mounted in a single jet, quickly, the upright stem of a vegetation, and at the tip of this white, cottony unending stem, there formed the immense bulbous mass of a red and black tulip blowing, like the fabulous aloe, in the crash of lightning; a still born flower shedding its petals in ominous fireworks.

At the second stroke of three, during the thousandth of a second in which this pyrotechnic flower had its life, Laurent, who was gazing at the petals, distinguished arms, legs, trunks, and entire human silhouettes, gesticulating horribly like disjointed puppets. He recalled analogous gestures and contortions in the canvases of visionary painters, evocators or scorcerers repairing to their sabbaths. And these parts of the red and black tulip, bloody and charred, rained, rained, rained in innumerable ruins to the accompaniment of untranslatable outcries and the continuous cannonade.