South Sea Tales | Page 8

The wind caught him and whirled him away. He
noted that it had hauled around to the east. With a great effort he threw
himself on the sand, crouching and holding his own. Captain Lynch,
driven like a wisp of straw, sprawled over him. Two of the Aorai'S
sailors, leaving a cocoanut tree to which they had been clinging, came
to their aid, leaning against the wind at impossible angles and fighting
and clawing every inch of the way.
The old man's joints were stiff and he could not climb, so the sailors, by
means of short ends of rope tied together, hoisted him up the trunk, a
few feet at a time, till they could make him fast, at the top of the tree,
fifty feet from the ground. Raoul passed his length of rope around the
base of an adjacent tree and stood looking on. The wind was frightful.
He had never dreamed it could blow so hard. A sea breached across the
atoll, wetting him to the knees ere it subsided into the lagoon. The sun
had disappeared, and a lead-colored twilight settled down. A few drops
of rain, driving horizontally, struck him. The impact was like that of

leaden pellets. A splash of salt spray struck his face. It was like the slap
of a man's hand. His cheeks stung, and involuntary tears of pain were in
his smarting eyes. Several hundred natives had taken to the trees, and
he could have laughed at the bunches of human fruit clustering in the
tops. Then, being Tahitian-born, he doubled his body at the waist,
clasped the trunk of his tree with his hands, pressed the soles of his feet
against the near surface of the trunk, and began to walk up the tree. At
the top he found two women, two children, and a man. One little girl
clasped a housecat in her arms.
From his eyrie he waved his hand to Captain Lynch, and that doughty
patriarch waved back. Raoul was appalled at the sky. It had approached
much nearer--in fact, it seemed just over his head; and it had turned
from lead to black. Many people were still on the ground grouped
about the bases of the trees and holding on. Several such clusters were
praying, and in one the Mormon missionary was exhorting. A weird
sound, rhythmical, faint as the faintest chirp of a far cricket, enduring
but for a moment, but in the moment suggesting to him vaguely the
thought of heaven and celestial music, came to his ear. He glanced
about him and saw, at the base of another tree, a large cluster of people
holding on by ropes and by one another. He could see their faces
working and their lips moving in unison. No sound came to him, but he
knew that they were singing hymns.
Still the wind continued to blow harder. By no conscious process could
he measure it, for it had long since passed beyond all his experience of
wind; but 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