[CHAPTER XXXIX.]
A GREAT STORM, IN WHICH PANURGE PLAYS THE COWARD.
The next morning the fleet started from Tohu and Bohu, cheered by the people, who were all in the best humor, because Pantagruel had left among them a new stock of frying-pans and skillets, so shining that they could see their faces in them. The sky was bright; the wind was fair; the very sea seemed to laugh,—all the fleet was happy. But Pantagruel sat on deck, looking very sad.
Friar John was the first to notice how still Pantagruel was. On seeing his Prince so glum, the good Friar, who was always a comforting kind of man, was just about asking him the reason, when James Brayer, the pilot, after cocking one eye at the sea, and the other at the sky, and then turning both eyes up towards the flag drooping on the poop, as though it would never wave again, knew that a storm was coming on, and, therefore, bid the boatswain pipe all hands on deck, and even summon the passengers.
"In with your top-sails!" he shouted. "Take in your spritsail! lower your foresail! lash your guns fast!"—all of which was done as quick as hands could do it.
Of a sudden, as though a great hand from above had swept down to stir the waters and make them mad, the sea began to swell, and moan and roar, and rise up into mountains, and sink into valleys. An awful north-west wind had got caught in with a hurricane,—so James Brayer said,—and the two together whistled through the yards, and shrieked through the shrouds. The sky itself seemed to be splitting open, and dropping down thunder, lightning, rain, and hail. In broad daylight it grew all dark, and the water rose to mountains, and sank to the depths in perfect blackness, save for the great flashes of lightning that showed the white faces of men, and the whiter foam of the sea.
It looked as though the end of the world had come, and that those on the sea had been the first to know it.
