“Thanks!” I called back, and broke off to my left among the sage and thistle and thorn.
I went now downhill into an overgrown water-course (very much like the one in which I used to sleep and eat away back by the artillery big gun). Here were willows and brambles with ripe blackberries, and wild-rose bushes with scarlet hips. “Just like England!” I thought.
And then, as I crossed the little dry-bed stream and came out upon a sandy spit of rising ground: “Z-z-ipp! Ping!”—just by my left arm. The bullet struck a ledge of white rock with the now familiar metallic “tink!”
I went on moving quickly to get behind a thorn-bush—the only cover near at hand. Here, at any rate, I should be out of sight.
“Ping!”
“Crack—ping!”
I could hear the report of the rifle. I lay flat on my stomach, grovelled my face into the sandy soil and lay like a snake and as still as a tortoise.
I waited for about ten minutes. It seemed an hour, at least, to me. The sniper did not shoot again. In front of my thorn-bush was an open space of pale yellow grass, with no cover at all. I crawled towards the left flank and tried to creep slowly away. I moved like the hands of a clock—so slowly; about an inch at a time, pushing forward like a reptile on my stomach, propelling myself only by digging my toes into the earth. My arms I kept stiff by my side, my head well down.
But the sniper away behind that little pear-tree (which stood at the far end of the open space) had an eagle eye.
“Ping! z-z-pp! ping!”