Maid of the Mist

by John Oxenham

But their position had been well chosen. The more the sand piled on their house and against it, the tighter it became. Then the rain came down in sheets and torrents, but no drop came through, except down the chimney, and that Wulf presently plugged with a blanket and let the smoke find its way out through an inch of opened door, which he had purposely placed to leeward, as all their great storms came from the south and south-west.

But the change of atmosphere was bracing, and with solid sand under their feet, and assured of the safety of their house, they welcomed it and felt the better for it.

After the first day's confinement he must out to see, and she would not stay behind. So they rigged themselves in oldest garments and fewest possible and started out.

They were drenched to the skin in a second and whirled away like leaves the instant they forsook the cover of their hollow.

Avice was being carried bodily towards their nearest shore. He feared she would go headlong into the sea and started wildly after her. He saw her throw herself flat and grip at the sand, but she was broadside on to the merciless wind and it bowled her over and over, and rolled her along like a ball. It carried him along in ten-feet leaps. He flung himself down beside her, put his arm round her, wrenched her head to the gale, and they lay there breathless, she choking hysterically with paroxysms of laughter.

It took them an hour, crawling like moles, to get back to the shelter of the hills. He would have had her go in, but she would not hear of it. They could hear the booming thunder of the great waves on the spit even above the wind, and she must see them.

So they set off once more, flat to the sand, and worked round in time to the breast of the great hill near the fresh-water pools, and lay in it, safe from dislodgment unless the hill went too.

They could only peer through pinched eyes, and then only with their hands over them, into the teeth of that wind, but, even so, the sight was magnificent and appalling. The grim gray sky and the grim gray sea met just beyond the spit, and out of that close sky the huge gray waves burst, high as houses,—whole streets of houses rushing headlong to destruction. They curved gloriously to their fall with a glint of muddy green below and all their crests abristle with white foam-fury. Right out of the sky they came, right up to the sky they seemed to reach, flinging up at it great white spouts of spray like flouting curses, towering high above the land, crashing down upon it with a thunderous roar which thinned the voice of the wind to no more than a shrill piping.

Their own land-locked lake was lashed into fury also. The flying crests of the outer waves came rocketing over in wild white splashes. He was not sure that some of the waves themselves did not cover the spit and come roaring into it. The 'Jane and Mary' danced wildly to her cable. He wondered if it would hold. The 'Martha,' more than ever on her beam-ends, was being pounded like a drum.

"Did you feel that?" he shouted in her ear, and she nodded, with a touch of fear in her wind-blown face. For, under the impact of one vast mountainous avalanche, the very ground on which they lay seemed to shake like a jelly, and the whole island shuddered.