And yet above it I thought that I could catch another, still more terrible, the wail of hundreds of people in agony.

After the first few minutes I began to be afraid that the roof would be battered in, or that the walls would crumble beneath this perpetual fire of the musketry of heaven.

But the cement was good and the place well built.
So it came about that the house stood the tempest, which had it been roofed with tiles or galvanized iron I am sure it would never have done, since the lumps of ice must have shattered one and pierced the other like paper.

Indeed I have seen this happen in a bad hailstorm in Natal which killed my best horse.

But even that hail was as snowflakes compared to this.
I suppose that this natural phenomenon continued for about twenty minutes, not more, during ten of which it was at its worst.