re brightly. His
whole nature was in the most violent tumult and as the captain noted
his flushed cheeks and the gloomy light in his eyes he thought that this
strong man, too, had been seized by the fever to which so many convicts
fell victims on the march.

When, at the approach of darkness, the wretched band sought a night's
rest in the midst of the wilderness, a terrible conflict of emotions
was seething in Joshua's soul, and the scene around him fitly harmonized
with his mood; for black clouds had again risen in the north from the
sea and, before the thunder and lightning burst forth and the rain
poured in torrents, howling, whistling winds swept masses of scorching
sand upon the recumbent prisoners.

After these dense clouds had been their coverlet, pools and ponds
were their beds. The guards had bound them together hand and foot and,
dripping and shivering, held the ends of the ropes in their hands; for
the night was as black as the embers of their fire which the rain
had extinguished, and who could have pursued a fugitive through such
darkness and tempest.

But Joshua had no thought of secret flight. While the Egyptians were
trembling and moaning, when they fancied they heard the wrathful voice
of Seth, and the blinding sheets of fire flamed from the clouds, he only
felt the approach of the angry God, whose fury he shared, whose hatred
was also his own. He felt himself a witness of His all-destroying
omnipotence, and his breast swelled more proudly as he told himself that
he was summoned to wield the sword in the service of this Mightiest of
the Mighty.

CHAPTER XX.

The storm which had risen as night closed in swept over the isthmus.
The waves in its lakes dashed high, and the Red Sea, which thrust a bay
shaped like the horn of a snail into it from the south, was lashed to
the wildest fury.

Farther northward, where Pharaoh's army, protected by the Migdol of the
South, the strongest fort of the Etham line, had encamped a short time
before, the sand lashed by the storm whirled through the air and, in
the quarter occupied by the king and his great officials, hammers were
constantly busy driving the tent-pins deeper into the earth; for the
brocades, cloths, and linen materials which formed the portable houses
of Pharaoh and his court, struck by the gale, threatened to break from
the poles by which they were supported.

Black clouds hung in the north, but the moon and stars were often
visible, and fl