They Moved Under A Cloak Of Invisibility, And Made One Feel
As Though He Were The Blind Man In A
Game of blind-man's-buff, where
every one tapped him in passing, leaving him puzzled and ignorant as
to whither
They had gone and from what point they would come next.
The bullets sounded like rustling silk, or like humming-birds on a
warm summer's day, or like the wind as it is imitated on the stage of
a theatre. Any one who has stood behind the scenes when a storm is
progressing on the stage, knows the little wheel wound with silk that
brushes against another piece of silk, and which produces the
whistling effect of the wind. At Velestinos, when the firing was
very heavy, it was exactly as though some one were turning one of
these silk wheels, and so rapidly as to make the whistling
continuous.
When this concert opened, the officers shouted out new orders, and
each of the men shoved his sight nearer to the barrel, and when he
fired again, rubbed the butt of his gun snugly against his shoulder.
The huge green blotches on the plain had turned blue, and now we
could distinguish that they moved, and that they were moving steadily
forward. Then they would cease to move, and a little later would be
hidden behind great puffs of white smoke, which were followed by a
flash of flame; and still later there would come a dull report. At
the same instant something would hurl itself jarring through the air
above our heads, and by turning on one elbow we could see a sudden
upheaval in the sunny landscape behind us, a spurt of earth and
stones like a miniature geyser, which was filled with broken branches
and tufts of grass and pieces of rock.
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