“Here is the place,” said Muller; “you must make haste through. The house is just the other side, and it will be better to get there before the tempest breaks.”
“It is all very well,” said John, “but I cannot see an inch before me; I don’t know where to drive.”
“Drive straight ahead; the water is not more than three feet deep, and there are no rocks.”
“I am not going, and that is all about it.”
“You must go, Captain Niel. You cannot stop here, and if you can we will not. Look there, man!” and he pointed to the east, which now presented a truly awful and magnificent sight.
Down, right on to them, its centre bowed out like the belly of a sail by the weight of the wind behind, swept the great storm-cloud, while over all its surface the lightning played unceasingly, appearing and disappearing in needles of fire, and twisting and writhing serpentwise round and about its outer edges. So brilliant was the intermittent light that it appeared to fire the revolving pillars of mud-coloured cloud beneath, and gave ghastly peeps of river and bank and plain, miles upon miles away. But perhaps its most awful circumstance was the preternatural silence. The distant boom and muttering of thunder had died away, and now the great storm swept on in voiceless majesty, like the passage of a ghostly host, from which there arose no sound of feet or of rolling wheels. Only before it sped the swift angels of the wind, and behind it swung the curtain of the rain.
Even as Muller spoke a gust of icy air caught the cart and tilted it, and the lightning needles began to ply more dreadfully than ever. The tempest was breaking upon them.
“Come, drive on, drive on!” he shouted, “you will be killed here; the lightning always strikes along the water;” and as he said it he struck one of the wheelers sharply with his whip.
“Climb over the back of the seat, Mouti, and stand by to help me with the reins!” called out John to the Zulu, who obeyed, scrambling between him and Jess.
“Now, Jess, hold on and say your prayers, for it strikes me that we shall have need of them. So, horses, so!”