THE HURRICANE.
"'Twas off the Wash--the sun went down--the sea looked black and
grim,
For stormy clouds with murky fleece were mustering at the brim;
Titanic shades! enormous gloom! as if the solid night
Of Erebus rose suddenly to seize upon the light!
It was a time for mariners to bear a wary eye,
With such a dark conspiracy between the sea and sky!"
Past a September noon. The great canopy of dark, murky clouds fell lower
and lower, until they nearly touched the earth, wrapping as in a blanket
the single cocoa-nut-tree on the crag, and shutting out the light and
air of heaven as they settled over the noxious lagoon, the mangrove
thickets, and pure inlet. The sea-birds came screaming in from seaward,
fluttering their wide-spread wings in the sultry atmosphere, and
alighting on the smooth rocks, where they furled their pinions and put
their heads together. The flying-fish no longer skimmed over the waves,
and the dolphin and shark sank deep down in the blue water, or lay still
and quiet beside the coral groves. The rolling, swelling ocean of the
tropic, with its glassy, greasy surface unruffled by the faintest air,
rolled heavily on until it struck the coral ledge, when, with a dull,
heavy roar, it broke over in creamy foam, and came sluggishly in to the
sandy beach. There the tiny waves lashed the shelly strand, and all was
still again. No sun; no breeze; and even the birds, and serpents, and
insects gasped for breath. The fish below the sea, the animated nature
above, and the very leaves and vines of the forests and thickets knew
what was brewing in the great vacuum around.
Slowly and painfully the man in the chapel regained his feet, and with
the child by the hand, moved on to the farthest corner by the rude
altar, where he sank down again, and, clasping the boy to his heart,
waited in breathless awe. As if the powder and flames had not done their
destructive work, the wrath of heaven was to be poured out over the
devoted den of the pirates.
Then came a bellowing roar as a current of wind swept over the sea,
cutting a pathway in the blue water, and scooping it up in an impalpable
mist, hurrying on to the low beach of the island, and tearing the sand
and shells up in heaps--and then a lull. Now, as if all the demons of
winds had let loose their cavernous lungs from the four quarters of the
earth, and like the shocks of artillery, volley upon volley, came the
hurricane. The sea became one boiling, seething, hissing surface of
foam, pressed and flattened by the weight of the tempest, which laid the
black rocks bare on the ledge, and drove the water into both mouths of
the inlet, until, with a crashing shock, it met in the basin, and broke
over and over the cove, and high up the wall of rocks on the other side.
Two or three streams of whirlwind meeting, too, over the island, drove
the lagoon hither and thither, catching up the white pond-lilies by
their long stems, twisting off the dense thickets of mangroves by the
roots, burrowing holes in the sandy beds of the cactus, and shearing off
their flat, thorny leaves and needle points by the acre together; then a
rushing whirl around the cocoa-nuts, bowing their tufted tops at first
till they nearly touched the earth, when, the stout trunks snapping like
glass, they would go pitching and tossing from base to crown, careering
and dancing aloft, borne away with sand and mangrove, cactus, flowers,
and sticks, into the flying clouds before the hurricane. Then another
lull; and from the opposite direction again thundered the terrible
breath of the demons, sweeping thousands of sea-birds, with broken
pinions, screaming amid the gale, hurling them against the crag,
stripping the feathers from their crushed carcasses, and in a moment
burying them a foot deep in clouds of sand. No more pauses or lulls now
in the hurtling tempest; but with a steady, tremendous roar, which made
the earth tremble, the rocks quake, and laid every vestige of vegetation
flat to the ground, it came on mightier and mightier, and fiercer and
fiercer, with black masses of never-ending clouds sweeping close down
like dark midnight, as if heaven and earth had come together. All
through the gloomy day and through the night this elemental war, with
its legions of careering demons, continued to lash the sea and smite the
land; until, as if satiated with vengeance, the clouds belched forth in
red lightning, vomiting out peal upon peal of awful thunder as a parting
salute, and then, moderating down to a hard gale from another quarter,
broke away. The blue sky appeared, and the glorious sun once more came
up in his majesty over the distant hills of Cuba.