There was a horrible, blood-freezing scream somewhere very close. I suddenly recognised it as my own, but I couldn't stop it. And I looked at the men, the brave and beautiful men beside me, running into the guns, and God help me for thinking it, and God forgive me for saying it, but it was glorious, it was glorious, if glory is a magnificent and raptured exaltation. It was what love would be like, if love was a sin. It was what music would be, if music could kill you. And I climbed a prison wall with every running step. And then, in a world suddenly soundless as the deepest sea, my legs stopped still, and hot, gritty, filthy, exploding earth clogged my eyes and my mouth. Something had hit my legs. Something hard and hot and viciously sharp had hit my legs. I fell forward as if I'd been running in the dark and I'd smashed into a fallen tree trunk. A mortar round. The metal fragments. The shock-deafened silence. The burning skin. The blinding earth. The choking struggle for breath. There was a smell that filled my head. It was the smell of my own death-it smells of blood, and seawater, and damp earth, and the ash of burned wood when you smell your own death before you die-and then I hit the ground so hard that I plunged through it into a deep, undreaming darkness. And the fall was forever. And there was no light, no light.
( Gregory David Roberts )
[ Shantaram ]
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