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… Twenty meters away, where they were paralysed with terror, Misard and Cabuche with arms in the air, Flore with eyes staring out of her head, saw this monstrous thing: the train rising with a sickening crash into a shapeless mass of wreckage. The three leading ones were reduced to matchwood and the four others were just a mountain of jumbled of smashed-in roofs, broken wheels, chains, buffers and bits of glass. Above all they had heard a crunching of the engine against the blocks of stone, a dull crunching sound ending in a cry of agony. Lison, disembowled, had overturned to the left, on top of the dray, and the stones had split and flown in splinters as though blasted in a quarry, while four of the five horses had been rolled and dragged along, killed instantly. … Lison lay with her wheels in the air, displaying her twisted coupling-rods, broken cylinders, smashed valve-gear with its eccentrics in one fearful wound gaping to the sky, through which her life was still issuing with a hiss of rage and despair. And by her side the one horse not killed outright was lying with its two fore-legs gone and, like her, was losing its entrails through a rent in its belly. By the look of its head, stiff and straight in a spasm of atrocious pain, it could be seen to be screaming in a last terrible whinny, though nothing could be heard above the noise from the expiring machine. … La Bête Humaine,
Émile Zola |
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