Then the cannon ball cloud seemed to break into pieces in a flame of blue fire, more dazzling than any lightning that ever flashed from heaven to earth, and at the same instant the sun was blotted out, though no cloud had been seen approaching it; the pall seemed to have dropped over the disc, not to have crept up to it.
“A storm is on us,” he said. “Whither can we fly for shelter?”
“The stones of Red Tor,” she replied; “that is the nearest place. There is plenty of shelter among the stones.”
“Come,” he cried, “there is no moment to be lost. Never have I known a storm fall so quickly.”
She was tarrying on the cliff brow watching the progress of the fishing boats.
“They will be in safety before disaster can overtake them,” she said.
Then she turned to hasten inland with him; but a sound that seemed to wedge its way, so to speak, through the long low boom, with scarcely a quiver in it, of the distant thunder, made her look round.
She cried out, her finger pointing to a white splash under the very blackness of the cloud that now covered half the hollow of the sky dome with lead.
“Never have I seen the like save only once, while the great gale was upon us returning from Georgia,” said he. “'Tis a waterspout.”
It was a small spiral that came whirling along the surface of the water whence it had sprung, and it made a loud hissing sound, with the swish of broken water in it. It varied in height from three feet to twenty, until it had become a thick pillar of molten glass, with branching capitals that broke into flakes of sea-foam spinning into the drift. Its path through the sea was like the scythe-sweep of a hurricane on the shore. Its wake was churned up like white curd, and great waves fled from beneath its feet.