Four years after being stabbed on an amphitheatre stage, Salman Rushdie sat across a courtroom from his convicted attacker Thursday and told jurors for a second time about the ambush that nearly killed him.

The prize-winning writer recalled feeling what he thought was a punch under his chin, then feeling blood coming from his neck.

Soon “I was on the stage, lying down, with an enormous pool of blood all around me,” Rushdie testified. “It was an enormous and expansive lake of blood.”