but this time I didn't fancy anything. For all I
could say to the contrary there was just an ordinary April storm brewing
over across the hills, and presently the thunder would begin, and then
the lightning, and after that the rain; still I felt like a man who is
on the verge of a great discovery, on the brink of finding that
something that means all the difference in the world between success and
failure. Even now when I come to consider calmly the emotions of that
hour I cannot say that what I have just written down is a true
description of my feelings and thoughts. What happened later that same
night has had its effect on my memory and has mixed itself inextricably
with my earlier recollections. All this about my fancying that the storm
meant more than a storm usually means may be due to the fact that, but
for it, the momentous event itself would never have occurred.

I do know that I was a little doubtful about the security of the
improvised tent that sheltered Moira, and I think I must have showed a
little of that anxiety in my face. That perhaps was what struck Cumshaw
and led him to make the remark that he did.

Presently Moira called us to tea, and we hauled ourselves up from the
grass and went over to her. The fire was burning up brightly and threw
the tent and the surrounding trees into bold relief. It made the sky
look even darker and more threatening than before. The scurrying clouds
had all passed away by now, but in their train came thicker and heavier
ones, big black things that rolled slowly across the evening sky with
the heavy implacability of Fate. They moved like the advancing vanguard
of a wild army of infamy, and soon had shut out altogether the dying
light of day and the growing radiance of the silver stars. The sudden
chill of thirty minutes previously had passed like a swift breath of
wind into the limbo of lost and forgotten things, and in its place had
grown a deadly hot oppressiveness that somehow reminded me of the
sweltering dampness of those Gaudalcanar forests I had so recently
described to Cumshaw. It filled us with something of its own torpor, so
much so that we ate languidly, and when we spoke at all we spoke in
monosyllables.

The storm broke almost without warning. There was just one low
premonitory growl of thunder, the sky was split by a yellow sword of
lightning, and then the rain came pouring down in the way that can be
best described as the bursting of the flood-gates of heav