The man was in shirt sleeves—and the man had originally climbed up from the trees to his work in a coat.
The roaring rumble of the train was closer now. There was no time to shout and bring the man back—and shouting was dangerous. There was no time to do anything—except, as he did, dart back to the outermost edge of the trees and search with his gaze the moonlit stretch of upward sloping grass.
Despite the distance, he saw the coat almost at once. It lay, right at the junction of the slope and the causeway, a black blot upon the scene and his duty.
He broke out from the trees and, doubled up, began to climb the two hundred yards of grass-covered hill. Behind him he could hear the car engines of his men and above their sound, drowning it to anyone who did not expect it to be there, the roaring of the nearing train and a high-pitched, nerve-tearing whistle as she began upon the wide, ever-sharpening curve towards the viaduct.
He ran and slipped on the rough, dry grasses and fell and picked himself up again and clambered up. He doubled himself up as much as he dared without sacrificing speed but he felt naked and alone and startlingly visible in the flooding moonlight. The rattling roar of the train was close and swelling closer and out of the corner of his eye he was aware of its black bulk onrushing.
He was flat on his belly now, at the top of the rise and the edge of the causeway. He flung out an arm and just missed touching the coat. The train roared above him with a whirling, shattering maelstrom of a noise, the lights from its myriad windows flashing over him darker and brighter gold than the moonlight. He gripped the grass and dragged himself upwards another foot and reached for the coat again and found it with his fingers. The train was not past him yet, and it was travelling fast. It must be longer than they had reckoned.
He pulled the coat towards him and let himself slide down the steepest part of the rise. When he came to a halt, he raised a cautious head and saw the engine curving around on to the viaduct. He was bound there, where he lay. He could not move. All of him was in watching eyes and waiting ears.
And then, came the sight and sound which told him Altinger had succeeded again. The sight was unreal and fantastic and like a bad piece of miniature effect in a cheap cinematograph film—and the sound was even more different from his subconscious anticipation. It went on so long. It was made up of so many different, intermingling sounds—and they went on and on and on. First the dull and tremendous and stomach-thumping roar of the explosion and then a tortured screaming of steel as pieces of the engine and first car—great monolithic inanimate chunks—separated ridiculously in air and hurtled through the stone parapet and plunged downwards out of his sight with a roaring, whistling sound which merged into the crashing and crumbling of stone and an incredible, squeaking bellow which followed as the next cars, whole and unbroken, lurched and rocked sideways and left the tracks and ploughed through more sections of the parapet and fell, shockingly twisting end over end, into the blackness.
And it all seemed to go on so long—and the minor sounds which made thin background for the major were so many and so acidly distinct—the crackle of rending wood, the shivering of glass, the wrenching, barking sound as rails and ties were torn from the earth to fly through air, the hideous rattle of fragments—even the thin, high screaming of human voices.
It all went on so long—for split seconds which were transmuted in his mind to hours; for split seconds which held him motionless as the three cars which had been added this night were torn from their predecessors before they had swung on to the viaduct. The tail of the hindmost was only a few yards away from him, to his right and above him. All three swayed drunkenly and lurched upon their outer wheels and could not right themselves and toppled and hit the edge of the causeway with their right flanks and bounced like toys and turned over with their whirring, whizzing wheels in air and pitched down the grassy slope in wild titanic disorder. And the sound of their falling drowned in his ears the other interminable sounds from the arroyo and the bridge.