It seemed as though their exhausted lungs found renewed strength to shout with double energy when their excitement had kept them silent for a while.
Dada spoke no more; pale and gasping, she sat with her eyes fixed on the tall obelisk and on the cloud of dust which, as the chariots neared the nyssa, seemed to grow denser.

At about a hundred paces from the nyssa she saw, above the sandy curtain, the red cap of Hippias flash past, and then--close behind it--the blue cap worn by Marcus.

Then a deafening, thundering roar from thousands of throats went up to heaven, while, round the obelisk--so close to it that not a horse, not a wheel could have found room between the plinth and the driver-the blue cap came forward out of the cloud, and, behind it now--no longer in front, though not more than a length behind--came the red cap of Hippias.

When within a few feet of the nyssa, Marcus had overtaken his antagonist, had passed the point with a bold and perilously close turn, and had left the bays behind him.
Demetrius saw it all, as though his eye had power to pierce the dust-cloud, and now he, too, lost his phlegmatic calm.

He threw up his arms as if in prayer and shouted, as though his brother could hear him: "Well done, splendid boy! Now for the kentron--the goad--drive it in, send it home if they die for it! Give it them well!" Dada, who could only guess what was happening, looked round at him, asking in tremulous tones: "Has he passed him?
Is he gaining on him?
Will he win ?" But Demetrius did not answer; he only pointed to the foremost of the flying clouds on which the second was fast advancing, and cried in a frenzy of excitement: "Death and Hades! The other is catching him up.