nding solidness. The wind was no longer air in motion. It had become
substantial as water or quicksilver. He had a feeling that he could
reach into it and tear it out in chunks as one might do with the meat in
the carcass of a steer; that he could seize hold of the wind and hang on
to it as a man might hang on to the face of a cliff.

The wind strangled him. He could not face it and breathe, for it rushed
in through his mouth and nostrils, distending his lungs like bladders.
At such moments it seemed to him that his body was being packed and
swollen with solid earth. Only by pressing his lips to the trunk of the
tree could he breathe. Also, the ceaseless impact of the wind exhausted
him. Body and brain became wearied. He no longer observed, no
longer thought, and was but semiconscious. One idea constituted
his consciousness: SO THIS WAS A HURRICANE. That one idea persisted
irregularly. It was like a feeble flame that flickered occasionally.
From a state of stupor he would return to it--SO THIS WAS A HURRICANE.
Then he would go off into another stupor.

The height of the hurricane endured from eleven at night till three in
the morning, and it was at eleven that the tree in which clung Mapuhi
and his women snapped off. Mapuhi rose to the surface of the lagoon,
still clutching his daughter Ngakura. Only a South Sea islander could
have lived in such a driving smother. The pandanus tree, to which he
attached himself, turned over and over in the froth and churn; and it
was only by holding on at times and waiting, and at other times shifting
his grips rapidly, that he was able to get his head and Ngakura's to the
surface at intervals sufficiently near together to keep the breath in
them. But the air was mostly water, what with flying spray and sheeted
rain that poured along at right angles to the perpendicular.

It was ten miles across the lagoon to the farther ring of sand. Here,
tossing tree trunks, timbers, wrecks of cutters, and wreckage of houses,
killed nine out of ten of the miserable beings who survived the passage
of the lagoon. Half-drowned, exhausted, they were hurled into this mad
mortar of the elements and battered into formless flesh. But Mapuhi was
fortunate. His chance was the one in ten; it fell to him by the freakage
of fate. He emerged upon the sand, bleeding from a score of wounds.

Ngakura's left arm was broken; the fingers of her right hand were
crushed; and cheek and forehead were laid open to the bone