ned
and widened.

Suddenly there came a lull. It quite startled us. But about half-a-mile
away, I could see over Alister's shoulders that the clouds were blacker,
and the sea took up the colour and seemed to heave and rock more sulkily
than before. There was no white water here, only a greenish ink. And at
the same moment Dennis and Alister each laid a hand upon my arm, but
none of us spoke. We lost ourselves in intense watching.

For by degrees the black water, leaving its natural motion, seemed to
pile up under the black cloud, and then, very suddenly, before one could
see how it happened, either the cloud stretched out a trunk to the sea,
or the sea to the cloud, and two funnel-shaped masses were joined
together by a long, twisting, whirling column of water that neither sea
nor sky seemed able to break away from. It was a weird sight to see
this dark shape writhe and spin before the storm, and at last the base
of it struck a coral reef, and it disappeared, leaving nothing but a
blinding squall of rain and a tumult of white waves breaking on the
reef. And then the water whirled and tossed, and flung its white arms
about, till the whole sea, which had been ink a few minutes before, had
lashed itself into a vast sheet of foam.

We relaxed our grip of each other, and drew breath, and Alister,
stretching his arms seawards after a fashion peculiar to him in moments
of extreme excitement, gave vent to his feelings in the following
words--

"Sirs! yon's a water-spout."

But before we had time to reply, a convict warder, whom we had not
noticed, called sharply to us, "Lie down, or you'll be blown down!" and
the gale was upon us. We had quite enough to do to hold on to the
ground, and keep the stone-dust out of our eyes by shutting them.
Further observations were impossible, though it felt as if everything in
the world was breaking up, and tumbling about one's ears.

Luckily nothing did strike us, though not more than a hundred yards away
a row of fine trees went down like a pack of cards, each one parallel
with its neighbour. House-tiles flew in every direction, shutters were
whipped off and whirled away; palm-trees snapped like fishing-rods, and
when the wind-squall had passed, and we sat up, and tried to get the
sand out of our ears, we found the whole place a mass of _debris_.

But when we looked seaward we saw the black arch going as fast as it
came. All sense of fever and lassitude had left us. The air was fresh,