Thus they were driven from the shelter of one doorway to another and as the houses began to fall more frequently, they were kept in the middle of the streets breasting the storm with that strength remained to them.
The older man, dragging the youth along by the arm, struggled in the direction of the great city wall under whose sheltering corners they could alone find safety. But to get out of this suburban labyrinth was difficult, doubtful, since its windings were becoming more choked and impassable by the debris of falling houses. Sometimes they made their way forward only to find the street blocked and themselves exposed to the full swish of the storm. They retreated, but eventually their rear was also choked with houses that had fallen after they had passed and which formed just such a barricade as had turned them back. Hemmed in with houses falling first on one side, then on the other, they stumbled backward and forward in a continually narrowing space. At any moment an overhanging wall might crash into the street and then it would be empty.
No one can hope to wholly describe a typhoon, that great wind, which is to the cyclone of the American plains what the tornado is to a little whirlwind adrift down a dusty road. Slaughter as well as destruction marks its path, for the typhoon is made up of flames and floods as it is of winds, and what escapes death or ruin from its cyclonic breath is devoured by its fires or swept away by its torrents. No one hopes in a typhoon, and men flee but a little way from it.
Nothing is more frightful than this iron whirlwind, nothing more wonderful. It has the cunning brutality of the inanimate and its treachery; the bloodthirstiness of some gigantic beast, the grandeur of God. It is horrible, yet sublime.
This monster of nature is born somewhere out of the huge womb of the South Pacific, upon whose bosom it strays aimlessly and recklessly about, romping, wrestling, growing, until it gets into a temper and buffets its mother, the sea. Becoming cyclopean, it spits at heaven—petulant it departs.
Like a loosened monster it allows itself every liberty, and wanders with the greatest ease in any path. It sucks up the sea and snatches lightning from the clouds; it fills its belly with floods and its breast with fire. Headlong it falls upon every obstacle; ships become as dust motes in its breath. It devours towns and babies with the same ease, the same glee. It laughs and screeches simultaneously. It is full of joy and rage at the same time and its joy is the more terrible. Sometimes it gets into traps and difficulties from which it can scarcely extricate itself; then it becomes frantic, shrieks, lingers and mutilates.
But in spite of all this gyratory brutality, this iron-toothed monarch of all winds cannot ravage far from the sea, though in its blind rage it never hesitates. Falling upon the coast it hurls ships into rice fields or upon hillsides; the sea front it covers with wrecks; fishing fleets are crunched into splinters and towns are strewn about as picked bones.
So the two struggled feebly against this monster backward and forward in the midst of falling houses, until finally, bruised and bleeding, they tottered into an open court surrounded by high massive walls. Near the centre of the court stood a low crucifix, a tub, and two black stones. Against the windward wall was built an open shed, and into this beyond the crucifix they tottered and lay exhausted, while the typhoon raged and destroyed around them. The lightning burned steadily and the noises, which once muttered and cried about them, were lost in the terrifying grind of the iron wind; a wind that picked up great logs like rice straws, and sometimes sent rice straws with such force that they pierced wood as steel needles—a wind that in its antics screamed, and in its butchery laughed.
The two men under the shed lay still, apparently oblivious to the storm wrack until the older man rose to his knees and began to feel around for his companion. Beside him, lit by the lurid glare from without, were a number of headless corpses, and among these lay the youth.