She halted, her eyes fascinated, lost in the North. He caught her up like a child. Across the lawn, through the roaring black, he bore her, brushing her fingers and her fallen hair from his eyes. He reached the curbing of the old well with his burden, crawled over and caught the rusty chain. Incandescent tongues lapped the cistern's raised coping. There was a scream as from the souls of Night and Storm and Chaos triumphant—a mighty planetary madness—shocking magnitudes from the very core of sound! Air was sucked from the vault, from their ears and lungs by the shrieking vacuums, burned through the cushion of atmosphere by the league-long lanes of electric fire.... Running streams of red dust filtered down.
It was eight on the morning of Ascension Day. La Montagne Pelée was giving birth to death.
TWENTY-FIFTH CHAPTER
THE SARAGOSSA ENCOUNTERS THE RAGING FIRE-MISTS FROM PELÉE EIGHT MILES AT SEA, BUT LIVES TO SEND A BOAT ASHORE
Peter Stock stared long into the faint film of smoke, until the launch bearing Charter ashore was lost in the shipping. The pale, winding sheet was unwrapped from the beauty of morning. There was an edging of rose and gold on the far dim hills. His eyes smarted from weariness, but his mind, like an automatic thing, swept around the great circle—from the ship to the city, to the plantation-house on the Morne and back to the ship again. He was sick of the shore, disgusted with people who would listen to M. Mondet and not to him. Miss Wyndam had refused him so often, that he was half afraid Charter would not be successful, but he was willing to wait two hours longer, for he liked the young woman immensely, liked her breeding and her brain.... He joined Laird, his first officer, on the bridge. The latter was scrutinizing through the glass a blotch of smoke on the city-front.
"What do you make of it, sir?" Laird asked.
The lenses brought to the owner a nucleus of red in the black bank. The rest of Saint Pierre was a gray, doll-settlement, set in the shelter of little gray hills. He could see the riven and castellated crest of Pelée weaving his black ribbon. It was all small, silent, and unearthly.
"That's a fire on the water-front," he said.
"That's what I made of it, sir," Laird responded.