t he knew somehow, nevertheless, that it was blowing harder. Not
far away a tree was uprooted, flinging its load of human beings to
the ground. A sea washed across the strip of sand, and they were gone.
Things were happening quickly. He saw a brown shoulder and a black head
silhouetted against the churning white of the lagoon. The next
instant that, too, had vanished. Other trees were going, falling and
criss-crossing like matches. He was amazed at the power of the wind. His
own tree was swaying perilously, one woman was wailing and clutching the
little girl, who in turn still hung on to the cat.

The man, holding the other child, touched Raoul's arm and pointed. He
looked and saw the Mormon church careering drunkenly a hundred feet
away. It had been torn from its foundations, and wind and sea were
heaving and shoving it toward the lagoon. A frightful wall of water
caught it, tilted it, and flung it against half a dozen cocoanut trees.
The bunches of human fruit fell like ripe cocoanuts. The subsiding wave
showed them on the ground, some lying motionless, others squirming and
writhing. They reminded him strangely of ants. He was not shocked.
He had risen above horror. Quite as a matter of course he noted the
succeeding wave sweep the sand clean of the human wreckage. A third
wave, more colossal than any he had yet seen, hurled the church into
the lagoon, where it floated off into the obscurity to leeward,
half-submerged, reminding him for all the world of a Noah's ark.

He looked for Captain Lynch's house, and was surprised to find it gone.
Things certainly were happening quickly. He noticed that many of the
people in the trees that still held had descended to the ground. The
wind had yet again increased. His own tree showed that. It no longer
swayed or bent over and back. Instead, it remained practically
stationary, curved in a rigid angle from the wind and merely vibrating.
But the vibration was sickening. It was like that of a tuning-fork or
the tongue of a jew's-harp. It was the rapidity of the vibration that
made it so bad. Even though its roots held, it could not stand the
strain for long. Something would have to break.

Ah, there was one that had gone. He had not seen it go, but there it
stood, the remnant, broken off half-way up the trunk. One did not know
what happened unless he saw it. The mere crashing of trees and wails
of human despair occupied no place in that mighty volume of sound. He
chanced to be loo