‘Are you going on deck, Dugdale?’ cried Mr. Johnson, shouting aloud, to render his voice audible above the continuous cannonading of the thunder.
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘You will be struck dead, sir,’ called out Mrs. Hudson.
‘I have half a mind to join you,’ said Mr. Emmett, jumping up with a wild look at the skylight: ‘it’s simply beastly down here.’
‘Hark to that!’ bawled the colonel; ‘there’s a shower for you!’
The wall of rain had reached us. For a minute before it struck the ship you could hear it hissing upon the sea like twenty locomotives blowing off steam; then plump! came the cataract on to our decks. Had every drop been a brick, the noise could not have been more astounding. One couldn’t hear the thunder for the roaring of the fall of water and hailstones, though the deep and awful note of the electric storm was in it to add to its tremendous sound. The darkness was now so heavy in the cuddy, that in the intervals of the lightning the faces of the people were scarce distinguishable. Amid the distracting noises of the thunder, of the breathless storm of hail and rain, of the water cascading off the decks overboard in a furious gushing and seething, arose the chorus of a number of seamen on the quarter-deck hauling upon the maintopsail halliards there, with the piercing chirruping of the boatswain’s pipe and hoarse orders delivered overhead from the poop.
‘Where’s the steward?’ bawled the colonel in his loudest tones. ‘Confound it, are we to be left in total blackness here? Why don’t some one light the lamps?’
‘Are you coming on deck, Mr. Emmett?’ I cried; but he had sunk back on his seat with his arms folded and his head bowed; and obtaining no reply, I walked to the companion steps, receiving, as I passed Miss Temple, a half interrogative glance from her, which made me look again in readiness to answer the question that seemed to hover on her lips. But her eyes instantly dropped, and the next instant she had turned to say something to her aunt, who was on a sofa behind her; so, rounding on my heel, up I went into the smoking wet.
There was nothing to be seen but rain—such a sheet of it as one must explore the latitudes we were in to parallel. The lightning flashed amidst it incessantly, and every line of the falling water sparkled like glowing wire in dazzling hues of crimson and of violet alternating. I waited under the shelter of the companion cover till the first weight of all this rain and hail should have passed. Through the haze of moisture that rose like steam off the decks to the cataractal swamping I could discern the figure of old Keeling looking like a soaked scarecrow, the fine-weather hat upon his head reduced to pulp and hanging about his ears like a rotten fig. The fellow at the wheel stood like a statue amid the drenching downpour; but the men who had been stationed at the guns were gone.
I had not been a minute in the hatchway when the heavens seemed to be split open to the very heart of their depths by a flash of lightning, followed in the space of the beat of a heart by a shock of thunder that seemed to happen immediately over our mastheads—a most soul-subduing crash, if ever there was one! and as if by magic, the rain ceased, and the atmosphere sensibly brightened. There was a great noise of shrieking in the cuddy, and half blinded, and pretty handsomely dazed by that terrible blast of lightning and the thunder-clap which had followed, I crept down the steps with my pulse beating hard in my ears to see what had happened, scarce knowing but that some one had been struck and perhaps killed.