Page:The four horsemen of the Apocalypse - (Los cuatro jinetes de Apocalipsis) (IA cu31924014386738).djvu/448

 roof was going to tremble like the deck of a ship when they shot over it. The room with its acoustic tubes and its vibrations from the telephones was like the bridge of a vessel at the moment of clearing for action. The noise that it was going to make!… A few seconds flitted by that to them seemed unusually long … and then suddenly a sound like a distant peal of thunder which appeared to come from the clouds. Desnoyers no longer felt the nervous twitter against his knee. The senator seemed surprised; his expression seemed to say, "And is that all?" … The heaps of earth above them had deadened the report, so that the discharge of the great machine seemed no more than the blow of a club upon a mattress. Far more impressive was the scream of the projectile sounding at a great height but displacing the air with such violence that its waves reached even to the window.

It went flying … flying, its roar lessening. Some time passed before they noticed its effects, and the two friends began to believe that it must have been lost in space. "It will not strike … it will not strike," they were thinking. Suddenly there surged up on the horizon, exactly in the spot indicated over the blur of the woods, a tremendous column of smoke, a whirling tower of black vapor followed by a volcanic explosion.

"How dreadful it must be to be there!" said the senator.

He and Desnoyers were experiencing a sensation of animal joy, a selfish hilarity in seeing themselves in such a safe place several yards underground.

"The Germans are going to reply at any moment," said Don Marcelo to his friend.

The senator was of the same opinion. Undoubtedly they would retaliate, carrying on an artillery duel.

All of the French batteries had opened fire. The mountain was thundering, the shell whining, the horizon,