There was another brilliant flash, but this time Rodd felt prepared and did not shrink. He only knelt, gazing out of the stern window, impressed by the grandeur of that which he had seen.
Behind him he felt that everything in the cabin had been as light as day, but away from him all around he had looked upon a vivid picture, a gloriously wondrous cloudscape stretching far above and reflected far beneath in the smooth, oily, gently heaving sea—a grand vision of mountains of blue and gold and purple, which quivered before his eyes for a few moments in such vivid intensity that his eyeballs ached; then all was black again for a few moments, and then came the deep-toned roar as of hundreds of distant mighty cannons; not a sudden, sharp, metallic crash as in the last instance, but a deep murmurous intonation which made the woodwork of the schooner tremble.
Rodd felt no fear—nothing but a sense of awe at the grandeur of the storm, and it was with a feeling of eagerness that he waited for the next flash. But a minute passed before there was a faint quivering which slightly lit up the sea, to give place to blackness, silence and darkness. Then there was another faint quivering light that seemed to come from somewhere behind where he stood, and again he waited for one of those vivid flashes that should show up the configuration of the clouds shaped in mountain and valley and distant cave.
And many minutes must have passed, during which time Rodd listened in the appalling silence for the distant soft and increasing rushing sound of the coming rain, even as he had listened before in far-off Devon to the coming of some summer storm.
“There will be wind too,” he thought. “I wonder whether all is made fast aloft; for a storm like this,” he continued, in his ignorance, “can’t come without a tremendous wind and a rush of rain.”
His next thought was that he would go on deck and see what the watch were about; but he hesitated to stir, for the thought of the gorgeous cloudscape he had seen fascinated him and held him to his place.
“I needn’t worry about that,” he thought. “Captain Chubb’s sure to be on deck. He wouldn’t sleep like we do. If I go and open the cabin door it will wake uncle up. Hah! It’s quivering again. The storm can’t be over like this. Now there’s another big flash coming.”
He had hardly formed the thought when from quite up in the zenith down into the depths of the sea the arch of heaven seemed to open out in a sharp jagged line of vivid blue light, shutting again instantaneously, and the boy knelt gazing before him in wonder, for there, about a mile away, with every spar and yard and rope standing out black against the blue light, was the picture—the model, it seemed to him to be—of a tall-masted brig sitting motionless upon the water; and then it was gone.
“Why, that must have been the one we saw,” thought Rodd, and he strained his eyes again as he listened for the roar of the thunder that should have succeeded the vivid zigzag flash of electricity; but it did not come, and he waited and waited in the darkness in vain, trying to grasp how it could be that a storm should come to an end in so strange and unsatisfactory a way according to his lights, and why there should be neither rain nor wind.
He waited, trying hard now to pierce the black darkness, but trying in vain.