BEFORE the man attained the age of twenty-one, there was no sign of what awaited him. Then he was snatched into the air on a mountainside, shocked into spasms, and tossed down on his belly like a fish. Hail beat his back. As a mistreated dog finds a new, gentle master, he cringed and wagged his head in wonder at having survived the lightning strike. He prodded his limbs and his torso to find them whole, if slightly singed. The storm attained pandemonium while he cowed within it. Escape was not offered; he could harbour but patience or madness. In the lees of submission he held on through veneration. His miraculous escape made a fine story for the following year, and elicited in him the odd shiver at any booming of thunder.

LATER, in a boat on a heaving sea, St. Elmo's fire caught him out. The spitting sphere assembled in a mesh of sparks and descended the mast like a spider to net him on the deck. Struck a second time, he suffered burns to his legs, and in a wry laugh that scorned the adage of 'never twice', showed angry fear like a hornet buzzing.

WHEN the third bolt bowled him from his horse, dropped on him from cloudless skies, he took it as a patient registers a diagnosis of terminal illness. His cheeks hollowed; his eyes searched the ground so as not to haunt the sky. It could not have been a freakish accident of the season, nor did 'thrice and over' carry any conviction. He had finished with false comfort the second time. Now he knew himself stalked by malevolence, prey to malice, marked in debit on some dreadful account. Whatever it was, it wanted him. He dredged his imagination, disgorged from memory the deepest recesses of his personal history to find a shield that might deflect the murderous intent and confuse the cold precision with which he was pursued.

THE next assault came at a country house. During the previous two days he had felt razors beneath his skin. There was no surprise in having the thing snarling outside. He was sunk in an armchair when the chimney-breast exploded to rain the house with fire and to force him outside. He bared his chest in defiance, screamed into the weather to finish this at once, and received in reply a show of electric discharge that forked laterally, as in laughter cloud to cloud.

MEDICAL examination detected nothing abnormal. Miserable confessions to sins real and imagined were to no avail. He dared not lead a wife and children into an existence where arbitrary extinction roamed as in a dream. There was no safety in transport; the fifth blast hit an aeroplane in which he was a passenger, roared with explosion, and sucked the craft into a dying spiral. He shook uncontrollably in his seat during the descent, then was weeping on the tarmac at the plane having landed safely when the sixth strike lifted him from his knees, bent his body, and steamed the rain-soaked ground.

HIS predicament was esteemed newsworthy and his case deemed a phenomenon for study, worthy of research. He was offered solace, commiseration, and sympathetic speculation about the karmic quilt to which he was sewn at a hem of celestial wrath. Perhaps it was because a child died beside him when lightning struck again, or because seven were the plagues and the cardinal sins, that he ended his demented dance with electromagnetic fields. He knew that the last flash he would see, and the bang he might hear would be final, because self-inflicted from the barrel of a gun. In this one instance, it was he who set the time, place, and outcome.