A young moon showed in the sky that night like a silver sickle, and the stars came out gloriously. As our heroes lay and looked at these sparkling worlds, they thought they had never seen anything more beautiful than that overarching spangled vault of heaven. God had been very good to them to guide them safely so far upon their way. Not a man had been lost. They were as they had started, all except the horses, which was, of course, a universal regret. Yet they were grateful, and did not forget to express it before they went to sleep.
From the cries that resounded over the prairie as well as in the forest beneath them, all through the earlier portion of the night, they knew that there was plenty of sport before them.
During the night a most tremendous thunderstorm burst over their heads with a perfect tornado of wind. Fortunately, they were protected from the full force by those granite cliffs that surrounded them like Titanic walls. They had chosen for their camp a grassy mound, round which those strange-shaped rocks upreared.
The tempest came on, with hardly any warning, just after the young moon had set. They could hear it sweeping over the forest before it reached up to them with a most terrific shrieking. They had only time to drag their loads under the waterproof tent and secure that more firmly, when all the three elements—fire, wind, and rain—were upon them in full force.
What a spectacle this was to those who cared to look! Our heroes crept to a split in the rocks, and looked out upon the fierce bombardment with feelings of awe and admiration.
Over the forest hung the electricity-charged cloud, like a great war-balloon that had been dropped from the bulging heavens. From this ruddy and smoke-tinted mass issued a perpetual discharge of forked lightning. These vivid streaks darted from all sides into that ocean of rank leafage. It was a magnificent display of fireworks. It needed but a moderate imagination to transform this driving cloud into a great demoniac air-vessel armed on all sides with Maxim and Gatling-like batteries of the deadly flame.
Without intermission the lurid flashes darted downwards and disappeared amongst the foliage, each shaft doubtless working havoc with those giant trunks. From the point our heroes looked, however, they could only watch the forked streaks of brightness disappear amongst that yielding blackness.
High above the rolling clouds reflected this vivid discharge with a ghostly pallor, while the avalanche of driving rain in the distance seemed a swirling curtain of blue and silver gauze.
Loud and quick thunderclaps resounded, one peal after another, like the rolling of a hundred batteries of artillery. For fully half an hour the flames and the loud rattle of thunder went on without a break.
They were above this aerial fire-ship, and could overlook its dark upper side from which no flashes came. Over it spread a mighty shadow, moving as it sailed like a black opening in the sky.