or,
bidding them, in God's name, to pause.

A stillness fell upon the mob of cannibals. A moment more, and they must
have thrown off this stupor, and I infallibly have perished. But Heaven
had designed to save me. The silence of these wretched men was not yet
broken, when there arose, in the empty night, a sound louder than the
roar of any European tempest, swifter to travel than the wings of any
Eastern wind. Blackness engulfed the world: blackness, stabbed across
from every side by intricate and blinding lightning. Almost in the same
second, at one world-swallowing stride, the heart of the tornado reached
the clearing. I heard an agonising crash, and the light of my reason was
overwhelmed.

When I recovered consciousness, the day was come. I was unhurt; the
trees close about me had not lost a bough; and I might have thought at
first that the tornado was a feature in a dream. It was otherwise
indeed; for when I looked abroad, I perceived I had escaped destruction
by a hand's-breadth. Right through the forest, which here covered hill
and dale, the storm had ploughed a lane of ruin. On either hand, the
trees waved uninjured in the air of the morning; but in the forthright
course of its advance, the hurricane had left no trophy standing.
Everything in that line, tree, man, or animal, the desecrated chapel and
the votaries of Hoodoo, had been subverted and destroyed in that brief
spasm of anger of the powers of air. Everything but a yard or two beyond
the line of its passage, humble flower, lofty tree, and the poor
vulnerable maid who now knelt to pay her gratitude to Heaven, awoke
unharmed in the crystal purity and peace of the new day.

To move by the path of the tornado was a thing impossible to man, so
wildly were the wrecks of the tall forest piled together by that
fugitive convulsion. I crossed it indeed; with such labour and patience,
with so many dangerous slips and falls, as left me, at the farther side,
bankrupt alike of strength and courage. There I sat down awhile to
recruit my forces; and as I ate (how should I bless the kindliness of
Heaven!), my eye, flitting to and fro in the colonnade of the great
trees, alighted on a trunk that had been blazed. Yes, by the directing
hand of Providence, I had been conducted to the very track I was to
follow. With what a light heart I now set forth, and walking with how
glad a step traversed the uplands of the isle!

It was hard upon the hour of noon when I came, all ta