“One day in summer, about forty years ago, I was riding across the head of the kloof where the stone stands whereon you read those words to-day. A thunderstorm was sweeping down from the north-west, but I took no heed, for I had never known fear of lightning nor anything else. The Bushmen were driving on a troop of elands, and I expected them to cross the saddle at the head of the kloof; so I left the horse concealed in a hollow and took my stand, with the rifle on my arm, at the foot of the rock.
“Soon the elands appeared; they ran for a short distance down the kloof, then halted just opposite where I was standing. One great bull stood apart from the others. As I lifted my rifle to take aim a flash leaped out of the cloud and struck the ground close to where the bull was standing, igniting the grass. The animal sprang back in terror. I fired—and it rolled over, dead.
“Then I laughed aloud and shouted that my aim was more true than that of the Almighty. An instant afterwards the heavens opened and flame enveloped me like a sheet. I fell, senseless, to the ground.
“When I recovered I thought night had fallen. I could smell that my clothing was scorched, but I felt no hurt. The rain had ceased and I was conscious of a sensation of warmth. I still thought it was night, but night blacker than I had ever known. After a while I stood up and groped about in terror, for I now imagined that the end of the world had come and that the sun had been quenched. Then I heard a bird singing: I still wondered; but when I heard the Bushmen calling to me from the other side of the kloof, where the dead eland lay, the truth struck me in all its terror: I was blind.
“I shrieked and blasphemed as I staggered about. I found my gun and tried to shoot myself, but the lightning had twisted it as you might twist a handful of straw. The Bushmen led me down to the homestead.
“Afterwards, I spent many days and nights in hell, but the day arrived when my pride lay broken in the dust, and I came to acknowledge that God’s Angel was sitting on that thundercloud, charged to save my soul.”
That night I lay long awake, thinking of old Sard’s tale. I had a very clear recollection of the inscribed stone and its surroundings, so tried to picture the tremendous episode of forty years back. The sultry summer day; the white thundercloud curdling into shape upon the hot north-western horizon and towering into the ether, until its spreading tentacles seemed to seize the world in a mighty grip. Later, the low muttering of thunder, pulsing from the monster’s baleful heart, and the thin streak of fire darting out far in advance of the rain and igniting the dry grass. Then the blasphemous jest of the strong man proud of his skill. Lastly, the thunderbolt winged to smite but not to slay, touching not so much as a hair of the head of the defiant human atom, but crushing the gun in his hand as though it were a reed, and filling his eyes with such excess of light that nothing less vivid could stir their sense for evermore.