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; bu