as I stooped, nearly waist-deep, groping. His rotary motion, in that
smother, made it extremely difficult to obtain any sort of hold. A
little more, and he would have knocked my legs from under me, but it
was as if my grim determination were by itself of a saving nature. He
submitted to being hauled up the beach, passively, like a sack. It was
a heavy drag on the sand; I felt him bump behind me on the edge of the
harder ground, and a deluge fell uninterruptedly from above. He lay
prone on his face, like a corpse, between Seraphina and myself. We could
not remain there, however.

But where to go? What to do? In what direction to look for a refuge? Was
there any shelter near by? How were we to reach it? How were we to
move at all? No doubt he had expired; and the earth, swept, deluged,
glimmering fiercely and devastated with an awful uproar, appeared no
longer habitable. A thunder-clap seemed to crash new life into him;
the world flared all round, as if turning to a spark, and he was seen
sitting up dazedly, like one called up from the dead. Through it all he
had preserved his hat.

It was fixed firmly down under his chin with a handkerchief, the
side rims over his ears like flaps, and, for the rest, presenting the
appearance of a coal-scuttle bonnet behind, as well as in front. We
followed its peculiar aspect. Driving on under this indestructible
headgear, he flickered in and out of the world, while, with entwined
arms and leaning back against the wind with all our might, Seraphina
and myself were borne along in his train. He knew of a shelter; and this
knowledge, perhaps, and also his evident familiarity with the topography
of the country, made him appear indomitably confident in the storm.

A small plain of coarse grass was bounded by the steep spur of a rise.
To the left a little river would burst, all at once, in all its windings
into a bluish sulphurous glow; and between the crashes of thunder there
was heard the long-drawn, whistling swish of the rushes and cane-brakes
springing on the boggy ground. We skirted the rise. The rain beat
against it; the lightning showed its streaming and furrowed surface.
We stumbled in the gusts. We felt under our feet, mud, sand, rocky
inequalities of the ground, and the moving stones in the bed of a
torrent, which broke headlong against our ankles. The entrance of a deep
ravine opened.

Its lower sides palpitated with the ceaseless tossing of dwarf trees
and bushes; and, motio