Within the Capes

by Howard Pyle

Jack and Tom were busy scaling and cleaning their fish when, all of a sudden, a shadow fell as though a hand had been stretched out across the sky. Jack ran out of the hut with his knife in his hand, and the next moment Tom heard him calling to him in a loud voice, bidding him to hurry out and look at what was coming. Then Tom dropped everything and ran.

As I said before, there was not a breath of air stirring, and yet a black ragged wrack of clouds was flying wildly above their heads. This bellying sheet of clouds hung very low in the air; above them it was of a dull leaden color, rimmed with a strange reddish light, but toward the west it was as black as ink. Although there was no wind going, a cold air seemed to breathe out of the black emptiness of the west, just such as you may feel when you open the door of a cool room in the summer time. The ocean near to them was grey, with the light from the east, and every now and then a white-cap would gleam, with a pallid light against the darkness behind; but in the distance it grew darker and darker, until the rim of the horizon was lost in the inky pall beyond. Every moment the gloom fell about them, until it seemed as though night had set in, though it was a good hour till sundown. A dull, whispering moaning sound came from out the hollow of the west, and Tom could hear it through all the beating and thundering of the surf behind him. There was something awful in that moaning that seemed to fill the air above and around them; both men stood looking out toward the west, and neither of them said a word. Tom noticed how the sea gulls were running restlessly up and down the beach, uttering shrill wild cries every now and then, but not taking to wing.

And every moment the deep moaning grew louder and louder.

Suddenly a faint breath of air came, and instantly the sound of the surf to the east was dulled as though a blanket had been spread over it. Then there was a pause,—then there was a wild sweep of the wind,—then, in an instant, the hollow roar was upon them and around them.

Out from the blackness of the west came rushing an awful grey cloud of mist and rain and salt spray, and before I can write these words, it struck the island with a tremendous and thunderous uproar. Tom and Jack were flung backward and down to the ground as though a wall had fallen upon them, and all around them was a blinding gloom of sand and rain and spray. Through this whirling darkness Tom saw the cutter lifted up and tossed over and over like a dead leaf. Even through all the uproar he could distinctly hear the noise of snapping and rending and tearing, as the trees and bushes of the thicket near to them were being torn up by the roots. Then he had a vision of one of the palmetto trees being whirled through the air as though it were a straw.

For a while he lay clinging flat to the ground, digging his fingers into the sand; but after a while he saw that Jack was crawling on his hands and knees toward the lee of the sand hills, not far away from where they lay; then he followed him in like manner.

It was a great while before they got safely to the shelter of the duns; I suppose that it could not have taken them less than half an hour to cross the two hundred yards of sand that lay between them and the lee of the sand hills. Every now and then a heavier gust than usual would come, and then they would lay flat upon the sand again, holding on to the shifting surface, as though they feared being blown bodily away. But between the gusts they would contrive to crawl a few feet farther.

At last they reached the lee of the hills, and so were sheltered from the full force of the wind, though the hurricane bellowed and roared above and around them with a noise such as Tom never heard before or since.

The rain increased till it fell in torrents; it did not beat down the wind, for the tempest blew more and more heavily until just before morning, when it was something frightful.

All that night the rain poured down upon them in a deluge, but I do not think that either of them noticed it, their minds being taken up with quite different matters. The darkness around them was utter and blank beyond what I can tell you. You could not have seen your hand within six inches of your face. It seemed as though the end of all things had come.