“There may have been a condition of incipient instability, waiting for rain, perhaps.”
“For rain—what rain?” interposed Pendleton.
In answer to him a vast sheet of purple lightning pictured all the north of the Vale. It vanished, sweeping us into an instantaneous blacker darkness, but again it glared, and again, while unmistakable thunders rang. In that dazzling fulgour the nearby features of the scene were revealed to us as in bright noontide, but above the Black Mixen, above Mynydd Tarw, above the other northern peaks, hung a great tower reaching into illimitable night like a waterfall from heaven. Again the lightning blazed, and we beheld the hanging shafts, like sun-pillars among clouds, save that these were black—or like aerial waterspouts soaring above the earth. And this stupendous cliff of water was visibly moving toward us, down the Vale!
Crofts Pendleton turned from the terrific sight, with a bitter-happy look. He gestured toward the north. In the effulgence and clamour of the storm he stood like a valiant pygmy.
“By God,” he shouted, “there’s one direction cut off—for the fiend who did this!”
“Particularly if the zigzag path has been blocked by the landslide,” added Belvoir.
“Praise God, the police are coming by the south road. There’s no missing him if he tries to leave the Vale to-night!”
“Sir Brooke!” cried Eve Bartholomew suddenly. “Sir Brooke! Where is he?”
“We should all like to know,” said Crofts.
These speeches had been shouts. Now the Doctor made a megaphone of his hands in order to be heard. In a blaze of lightning lasting several seconds we saw him hunch his shoulder and head toward the top of the Vale, whence the rain, white rain now, and horrible, was pushing back towards us. “This will be on us in a minute. We can’t leave this poor fellow’s remains here, regulations or no. We must get the location and position of the body down in writing at once. I’ll take responsibility.”