lugubrious litany.

The air felt unusually heavy and oppressive. Felix raised his eyes to the
sky, and saw whisps of light cloud drifting in rapid flight over the
scudding moon. Below, an ominous fog bank gathered steadily westward.
Then one clap of thunder rent the sky. After it came a deadly silence.
The moon was veiled. All was dark as pitch. The natives themselves fell
on their faces and prayed with mute lips. Three minutes later, the
cyclone had burst upon them in all its frenzy.

Such a hurricane Felix had never before experienced. Its energy was
awful. Round the palm-trees the wind played a frantic and capricious
devil's dance. It pirouetted about the atoll in the mad glee of
unconsciousness. Here and there it cleared lanes, hundreds of yards in
length, among the forest-trees and the cocoanut plantations. The noise of
snapping and falling trunks rang thick on the air. At times the cyclone
would swoop down from above upon the swaying stem of some tall and
stately palm that bent like grass before the wind, break it off short
with a roar at the bottom, and lay it low at once upon the ground, with a
crash like thunder. In other places, little playful whirlwinds seemed to
descend from the sky in the very midst of the dense brushwood, where they
cleared circular patches, strewn thick under foot with trunks and
branches in their titanic sport, and yet left unhurt all about the
surrounding forest. Then again a special cyclone of gigantic proportions
would advance, as it were, in a single column against one stem of a
clump, whirl round it spirally like a lightning flash, and, deserting it
for another, leave it still standing, but turned and twisted like a screw
by the irresistible force of its invisible fingers. The storm-god, said
Toko, was dancing with the palm-trees. The sight was awful. Such
destructive energy Felix had never even imagined before. No wonder the
savages all round beheld in it the personal wrath of some mighty spirit.

For in spite of the black clouds they could _see_ it all--both the
Europeans and the islanders. The intense darkness of the night was
lighted up for them every minute by an almost incessant blaze of sheet
and forked lightning. The roar of the thunder mingled with the roar of
the tempest, each in turn overtopping and drowning the other. The hut
where Felix and Muriel sheltered themselves shook before the storm; the
very ground of the island trembled and quivered--like the timbers of a
g