Within the Capes

by Howard Pyle

Tom and Jack sat hand in hand;—when one of them said anything to the other, he had to put his lips to within an inch of his companion’s ear, to make him understand a single word. But very little was said between them, and most of the time they sat holding one another’s hand in silence. Now and then the ground would actually tremble beneath them, and at times a dim fear passed through Tom’s mind that the very sand hill above them would be carried bodily away with the force of that tremendous blast. About day-break, or what would have been day-break at an ordinary time, the rain ceased to fall, though the hurricane still raged with nearly as much fury as ever.

At last the faint grey daylight came, and after a while they were able to see the things around them pretty clearly. The first thing that Tom saw was a white sea gull crouched on the ground close to him. He could have reached out his hand and have touched it, but it did not seem to be in the least afraid at his presence. There were hundreds of them around, but they all seemed to be dulled with terror, and made no effort to move out of the way, or to take to flight.

At length, in the dim morning light, the ocean came out before them; it was a strange sight, for the surf was beaten down by the wind, until the sand beach reached out half as far again as it did on ordinary occasions.

At first they could see nothing of the sandy hook to the southward, for, though no sea was running, and though the ocean was leveled to a seething sheet of whiteness, the water was banked up in the bay, and covered the sand spit completely. The first thought that occurred to Tom was that the whole bar had been swallowed up, and that there had been an earthquake, though they had not noticed it in all the bewilderment of the tempest. But, as the light grew stronger and stronger, they could see the gleam of wet sand here and there, and then could see the water running over it from the bay to the ocean.

By this time the storm was beginning to fall, though they did not dare to leave their shelter for an hour or so later, and though the wind was still heavy until the middle of the afternoon.

When they did leave the lee of the hill, the sight was strange enough; the palmetto trees were all gone but one, and it was more than half stripped of leaves.

One of them had been carried more than a quarter of a mile, and was now lying half buried in the sand at the base of the dun, beneath which they had taken shelter.

There was not a sign of their home in the sand hill, for not only was the place levelled over as completely as though it had never been, but the very shape of the hills themselves had been changed by the sand that had blown against them here, or had been carried away from them there.

The cutter had been swept away to a distance of two or three hundred yards. It had lodged in a hollow between two of the duns. It was lying keel up, and the sand was banked around the weather side of it like a snowdrift. Strange enough, it was not much more broken than it had been before, so they got it back again in a day or two, and it was still sound enough to serve for their roof for the balance of the time that they stayed on the island.

The great stack of brushwood that they had heaped on the highest sand-dun had all been carried away, as had also their signal tree with the bush lashed to it. Everything was salt with the spray that had been carried inland, and the island flats were dotted all over with pools of salt water, that had been blown or swept over the land. Wherever this salt water lay the grass was killed or blackened, so that the following summer the island looked as though fire had passed over it.