e vous dis! Allons! il n'y a--My God! what is that?" ...

For a moment there was a ghastly hush of voices. And through that hush
there burst upon the ears of all a fearful and unfamiliar sound, as of
a colossal cannonade rolling up from the south, with volleying
lightnings. Vastly and swiftly, nearer and nearer it came,--a
ponderous and unbroken thunder-roll, terrible as the long muttering of
an earthquake.

The nearest mainland,--across mad Caillou Bay to the sea-marshes,--lay
twelve miles north; west, by the Gulf, the nearest solid ground was
twenty miles distant. There were boats, yes!--but the stoutest swimmer
might never reach them now!

Then rose a frightful cry,--the hoarse, hideous, indescribable cry of
hopeless fear,--the despairing animal-cry man utters when suddenly
brought face to face with Nothingness, without preparation, without
consolation, without possibility of respite ... Sauve qui peut! Some
wrenched down the doors; some clung to the heavy banquet-tables, to the
sofas, to the billiard-tables:--during one terrible instant,--against
fruitless heroisms, against futile generosities,--raged all the frenzy
of selfishness, all the brutalities of panic. And then--then came,
thundering through the blackness, the giant swells, boom on boom! ...
One crash!--the huge frame building rocks like a cradle, seesaws,
crackles. What are human shrieks now?--the tornado is shrieking!
Another!--chandeliers splinter; lights are dashed out; a sweeping
cataract hurls in: the immense hall rises,--oscillates,--twirls as
upon a pivot,--crepitates,--crumbles into ruin. Crash again!--the
swirling wreck dissolves into the wallowing of another monster billow;
and a hundred cottages overturn, spin in sudden eddies, quiver,
disjoint, and melt into the seething.

... So the hurricane passed,--tearing off the heads of the prodigious
waves, to hurl them a hundred feet in air,--heaping up the ocean
against the land,--upturning the woods. Bays and passes were swollen
to abysses; rivers regorged; the sea-marshes were changed to raging
wastes of water. Before New Orleans the flood of the mile-broad
Mississippi rose six feet above highest water-mark. One hundred and
ten miles away, Donaldsonville trembled at the towering tide of the
Lafourche. Lakes strove to burst their boundaries. Far-off river
steamers tugged wildly at their cables,--shivering like tethered
creatures that hear by night the approaching howl of destroyers.