But first he must make
his diminished provisions and his powder safe against the elements; and
this he did, covering them with a waterproof stuff and burying them in a
northern slope of sand.
He awoke in the small hours of the night. The stars of the zenith were
quenched. Blackness walled and roofed him in close about his crumbled
fire, save when at shorter and shorter intervals and with more and more
deafening thunders the huge clouds lit up their own forms, writhing one
upon another, and revealed the awe-struck sea and ghostly sands waiting
breathlessly below. He rose to lay on more fuel, and while he was in the
act the tornado broke upon him. The wind, as he had forecast, came out of
the southeast. In an instant it was roaring and hurtling against the
farther side of his island rampart like the charge of a hundred thousand
horse and tossing the sand of the dunes like blown hair into the
northwest, while the rain in one wild deluge lashed the frantic sea and
weltering lagoon as with the whips of the Furies.
He had kept the sail on the beach for a protection from the storm, but
before he could crawl under it he was as wet as though he had been tossed
up by the deep, and yet was glad to gain its cover from the blinding
floods and stinging sand.
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