My body snaps out of its confinement and in my tremor I lurch against the wall of the tent, bringing it down on top of me. I flounder there, pulling the canvas this way and that, struggling to free myself.

Now I am kneeling in the wreckage of the tent, facing a soldier who stands with his knees flexed before me bayonet levelled. He charges me with a high wail like something out of a madhouse and I throw my arms in the air. He stops short the bayonet only a foot away from me, but he wails again and again, glaring at me eyes white, his howls more terrifying than any attack.

Voices speaking normally—men walking along the height—the shots have stopped. Their assault is over, and whatever I was just a moment before, I am only a captive now. The first soldier to take me comes up, looking sternly at the ruined tent, but he says something to the other, who stops voice at his approach. With a start I hear the man who nearly bayonetted me exchange words calmly in a voice that is even rather beautiful with the other. They turn to me at once, and motioned me to stand.

The rain abates. They march me to a small clear spot by the top of the slope, hemmed in with big rocks. I am made to sit with my back to one, by the very top of the slope, and bayonet will stay to keep an eye on me, sitting on a stone by the aperture in the rock ring where the path threads.

I hear their voices move off, and then nothing but the crumpling sound of water draining among the stones, down the slope. I sit on the wet ground numb as a stone. Bayonet seems preoccupied, his eyes remote. Suddenly all my vitality is gone, and I nod.

A hiss explodes my sleep—bayonet bolts white faced to his feet barking out with fright as the lieutenant steps into the circle ... dew dropping onto the front of his uniform from his dangling end of his jaw, his own blood.

“Xupí!” the guard breathes, and runs away, footfalls scraping on the ground.

The lieutenant is walking away from me, arms at his sides. He dwindles into the shade at the edge of the circle. Unshackled, my life leaps into my legs and I get up, scramble down the slope from one rock to another my feet slip crazily but I keep my balance—now I’m in the passageways between the boulders—now flying down the mushy slope somehow keeping my feet beneath me and not behind me.