The Pools of Silence

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

Adams, worn out, was seated at the table in the living room smoking some tobacco he had found in a tin on the shelf, and listening to the rambling of Berselius, when the thunder-clap came, making the lamp shiver on the table.

Meeus, who had been silent since his death sentence had been read to him, cried out at the thunder, but Berselius did not heed—he was hunting elephants under a burning sun in a country even vaster than the elephant country.

Adams rose up and came to the door; not a drop of rain had fallen yet. He crossed the yard and stood at the fort wall looking into blackness. It was solid as ebony, and he could hear the soldiers, whose huts were outside the wall, calling to one another.

A great splash of light lit up the whole roof of the forest clear as day, and the darkness shut down again with a bang that hit the ear like a blow, and the echoes of it roared and rumbled and muttered, and died, and Silence wrapped herself again in her robe and sat to wait.

Now, there was a faint stirring of the air, increasing to a breeze, and far away a sound like the spinning of a top came on the breeze. It was the rain, miles away, coming over the forest in a solid sheet, the sound of it increasing on the great drum of the forest’s roof to a roar.

Another flash lit the world, and Adams saw the rain.

He saw what it is given to very few men to see. From horizon to horizon, as if built by plumb, line and square, stretched a glittering wall, reaching from the forest to the sky. The base of this wall was lost in snow-white billows of spray and mist.

Never was there so tremendous a sight as this infinite wall and the Niagara clouds of spray, roaring, living, and lit by the great flash one second, drowned out by the darkness and the thunder the next.

Adams, terrified, ran back to the house, shut the door, and waited.

The house was solidly built and had withstood many rains, but there were times when it seemed to him that the whole place must be washed away bodily. Nothing could be heard but the rain, and the sound of such rain is far more terrifying than the sound of thunder or the rumble of the earthquake.