The young girl came running up.
She was still screaming, wordlessly, breathlessly, as though these primitive shrieks were her actual language. She bundled the silver silken cloth up before her young breast with both arms in order to bring the man who lay beneath it into the light again.
Yes, he lay there now, stretched out at his length on his back, and the silk which was so strong as to have borne him tore under the grip of his fingers. And where his fingers lost hold of the silk, to find another patch which they could tear, there remained moist, red marks upon the stuff, such as are left behind by an animal that had dipped its paws into the blood of its enemy.
The girl was silenced by the sight of these marks.
An expression of horror came into her face, but, at the same time, an expression such as mother-beasts have when they scent an enemy and do not want to betray themselves nor their offspring in any way.
She clenched her teeth together so forcibly that her young mouth became quite pale and thin. She knelt down beside the young man and lifted his head into her lap.
The eyes opened in the white face which she was holding. They stared into the eyes which were bending over them. They glanced sideways and searched across the sky.
A rushing black point in the scarlet of the westerly sky, from which the sun had sunk....
The aeroplane....
Now it had indeed carried out its will and was flying towards the sun, further and further westward. At its wheel sat the man who would not turn back, as dead as could be. The airman’s cap hung down in shreds from the gaping skull, on to the bull-like shoulders. But the fists had not lost hold of the wheel. They still held it fast....