With a rumble the wind-clouds loosed their first furious gusts in a rage that tore the clouds themselves into a jagged pattern. Ragged openings gave vistas into the still more fearful storm that they had masked!
Through the barrage of thunderheads burst a three-headed tornado, three huge twisting wind-spouts that seemed to reach from earth to sky. Writhing, speeding, twisting across the sky, they pursued the Nardak like great devouring serpents. Devourers they were! Terrific wind velocity within those whirling storms could pluck the hair from the human head, could tear a man limb from limb, could wrench a great airship into shreds and splinters.
With a rush and a roar, forerunners of the storm seemed to burst upon the Nardak from all quarters, seemed bound to beat the great hulk into submission.
Gone was the smooth, swift gliding with which the Nardak had swept northward for more than a thousand miles. In the fury of the gale, the huge ship of the air rocked and plunged. Everything not built in or lashed into place was flung crashing about the hull. Lee Renaud and Captain Jan were careened together and then dashed to the floor and flung hither and yon in a welter of broken furnishings.
“Is it the—the end? Will she capsize?” Lee managed to shout to Captain Jan.
“Heavy ballast—can’t turn over. This pounding within, without, that’s the danger.” Even as Captain Jan spoke, came a thunderous crash of falling objects within the hull. “The struts—if they break, they’ll slash the bags like knives!”
Like some hunted wild animal, the Nardak plunged on her way, riding the constantly changing air currents, sweeping on the edges of the storm, dodging between gales, by a miracle of maneuvering never letting herself be completely swallowed in the maw of the storm monster.
Behind her, three snaky wind-spouts came together with a concussion that rocked sky and earth. In the twinkling of an eye, the face of the land was changed. Trees, boulders, a whole cliff were swept upward and reduced to powder in the grinding crush of the winds. A great air wave, like some tidal wave of the sea, flung the huge Nardak high as though it were a bit of chaff, sucked it earthward to almost scrape the ground.
Then, as swiftly as it had roared into being, the tempest died away. The wind muttered and rumbled low, and dropped into a strange calm.
For a little space the airship hung in this calm, quivering and trembling like some spent runner that has barely survived a terrific race.