The sea beyond the limit of a mile or so was flat as a board, beaten to a dead level by the coming wind and white as frosted silver.
They did not wait to see more; turning, crouching, running as swiftly as possible, and nearly lifted from their feet, they made for the shelter of the grove. They heard the coconuts torn from the palms striking the sand, and Floyd had a momentary vision of nuts hitting the lagoon like round shot fired by artillery, and then the whole solid world seemed to smash like a ball of glass, as the blaze of lightning and the concussion of the first peal of thunder shook the island as a drum skin is shaken by the stroke of the stick.
Floyd felt Isbel nestling close to him like a frightened animal, and he put his arm round her to protect her. He heard Schumer calling out something, but what he could not tell. The wind had now followed on the thunder in its fullest force, and it yelled.
No earthly sound could be compared to that ceaseless, mad, devilish yell that seemed the expression of all the ferocity of all the ferocious things that had ever inhabited the earth.
It was enmity made vocal. The enmity of the infinite and eternal.
And there was no rain. For a moment Floyd thought that there was no rain; then, lying on his stomach and crawling a bit forward, he saw the rain. It was not falling, it was driving across the lagoon in a great sheet upheld by the wind, and the lightning when it struck again showed through a roof of water.
Then, the first rush of the wind slackening, the rain, upheld no longer, came down with a roar.
"It's not a cyclone," Schumer shouted to Floyd; "it's just a storm—the grandfather of all storms!"
His voice was cut off by the voice of the sea, that had now added itself to the wind and the thunder.
The sea, no longer beaten flat, had risen in its might, and was raiding the reef. The sound was like the roar of a railway train in a tunnel. Something of the vibration reached them through the ground they were lying on.