ed to scrape the
cloud-zenith. The horizon drew in on us till it seemed scarcely half a
mile away. The _Elsinore_ was embayed in a tiny universe of mist and
sea. The lightning played. Sky and horizon drew so close that the
_Elsinore_ seemed on the verge of being absorbed, sucked in by it, sucked
up by it.

Then from zenith to horizon the sky was cracked with forked lightning,
and the wet atmosphere turned to a horrid green. The rain, beginning
gently, in dead calm, grew into a deluge of enormous streaming drops. It
grew darker and darker, a green darkness, and in the cabin, although it
was midday, Wada and the steward lighted lamps. The lightning came
closer and closer, until the ship was enveloped in it. The green
darkness was continually a-tremble with flame, through which broke
greater illuminations of forked lightning. These became more violent as
the rain lessened, and, so absolutely were we centred in this electrical
maelstrom, there was no connecting any chain or flash or fork of
lightning with any particular thunder-clap. The atmosphere all about us
paled and flamed. Such a crashing and smashing! We looked every moment
for the _Elsinore_ to be struck. And never had I seen such colours in
lightning. Although from moment to moment we were dazzled by the greater
bolts, there persisted always a tremulous, pulsing lesser play of light,
sometimes softly blue, at other times a thin purple that quivered on into
a thousand shades of lavender.

And there was no wind. No wind came. Nothing happened. The _Elsinore_,
naked-sparred, under only lower-topsails, with spanker and crojack
furled, was prepared for anything. Her lower-topsails hung in limp
emptiness from the yards, heavy with rain and flapping soggily when she
rolled. The cloud mass thinned, the day brightened, the green blackness
passed into gray twilight, the lightning eased, the thunder moved along
away from us, and there was no wind. In half an hour the sun was
shining, the thunder muttered intermittently along the horizon, and the
_Elsinore_ still rolled in a hush of air.

"You can't tell, sir," Mr. Pike growled to me. "Thirty years ago I was
dismasted right here off the Plate in a clap of wind that come on just as
that come on."

It was the changing of the watches, and Mr. Mellaire, who had come on the
poop to relieve the mate, stood beside me.

"One of the nastiest pieces of water in the world," he concurred.
"Eighteen years ago the