The last slow trailers in the rear of the exodus were just passing, and Nalasu, his bow and his eighty arrows clutched to him, Jerry at his heels, made his first step to follow, when the air above him was rent by a prodigiousness of sound.
Nalasu sat down abruptly.

It was his first shell, and it was a thousand times more terrible than he had imagined.

It was a rip-snorting, sky- splitting sound as of a cosmic fabric being torn asunder between the hands of some powerful god.

For all the world it was like the roughest tearing across of sheets that were thick as blankets, that were broad as the earth and wide as the sky.
Not only did he sit down just outside his door, but he crouched his head to his knees and shielded it with the arch of his arms.

And Jerry, who had never heard shell-fire, much less imagined what it was like, was impressed with the awfulness of it.