_June_ 1891.
I had been sitting out on the deck for more than a quarter of an hour when
heavy clouds rose in the west. They came up, black, tumbled, and tattered,
with streaks of lurid light showing through here and there. The little
boats scurried off into the smaller arm of the river and clung with their
anchors safely to its banks. The reapers took up the cut sheaves on their
heads and hied homewards; the cows followed, and behind them frisked the
calves waving their tails.
Then came an angry roar. Torn-off scraps of cloud hurried up from the
west, like panting messengers of evil tidings. Finally, lightning and
thunder, rain and storm, came on altogether and executed a mad dervish
dance. The bamboo clumps seemed to howl as the raging wind swept the
ground with them, now to the east, now to the west. Over all, the storm
droned like a giant snake-charmer's pipe, and to its rhythm swayed
hundreds and thousands of crested waves, like so many hooded snakes. The
thunder was incessant, as though a whole world was being pounded to pieces
away there behind the clouds.
With my chin resting on the ledge of an open window facing away from the
wind, I allowed my thoughts to take part in this terrible revelry; they
leapt into the open like a pack of schoolboys suddenly set free. When,
however, I got a thorough drenching from the spray of the rain, I had to
shut up the window and my poetising, and retire quietly into the darkness
inside, like a caged bird.