Stuart would have rather not. But he dared not refuse. They had hardly left the hurricane wing and got to the outside, when "Ol' Doc" sniffed.
"No," he said, "we'll go back. We're not full in the center. The edge will catch us again."
He pointed.
Not slowly this time, but with a swiftness that made it seem unreal, a shape like a large hand rose out of the night and blotted out the stars. A distant clamor could be heard, at first faintly, and then with a growing speed, like the oncoming of an express train.
"In with you, in!" cried the scientist.
They rushed through the low passage and bolted the heavy door.
Then with a crash which seemed enough to tear a world from its moorings, the opposite side of the hurricane struck, all the worse in that it came without even a preparatory breeze. The noise, the tumult, the sense of the elements unchained in all their fury was so terrible that the boy lost all sense of the passage of time. The negroes no longer moaned or prayed. A stupor of paralysis seized them.
So passed the night.
Towards morning, the painful rarefaction of the air diminished. The squalls of rain and all-devouring gusts of wind abated, and became less and less frequent.
The sky turned gray. Upon the far horizon rose again the cirrus arc, but with the dark above and the light below. Majestically it rose and spanned the sky, and, under its rim of destruction, came the sunrise in its most peaceful colors of rose and pearl-gray, sunrise upon a ravaged island.