companied by heavy
rain, about the time when I was emerging from my state of delirium.

But a few days after we had completed the shell of the boat, and while I
was preparing the planking with which to lay her deck, there occurred
signs of a change. The wind, which usually blew a moderate breeze from
the eastward, died away to a calm, and the sky became veiled by a thin
film of haze that gradually thickened until the sun was completely
blotted out. The atmosphere grew almost unbearably sultry, so that we
seemed to breathe only with the utmost difficulty, while work, even the
lightest, became almost impossible. The barometer fell so rapidly that
even the veriest tyro in weather lore could not have mistaken the signs;
and that night, or rather in the small hours of morning, a thunderstorm
broke over us, the like of which for violence and duration I had never
seen.

It started dry, and for four hours the heavens were incessantly ablaze
with lightnings, the vividness and alarming character of which it is
quite impossible to describe, while the continuous crash of thunder,
immediately overhead as it seemed, was terrific, causing the very wreck
herself to tremble with its vibrations. As I left my cabin and went up
on deck to watch it, I felt that sooner or later the wreck must
inevitably be struck; and indeed I frequently thought she actually had
been, for the lightning seemed to be playing all about her. But I
suppose she escaped somehow; or at least, if she was struck, no apparent
damage was done.

Then, about the time when daylight was beginning to make itself
apparent, it suddenly began to rain, the warm fresh water from the
clouds pelting down in a perfect deluge and totally obscuring everything
beyond a hundred yards' radius. The water poured off the decks in
cataracts, while from the poop it gushed through a scupper which
discharged on to the main-deck as though flowing from the spout of a
pump. In ten minutes the decks were as effectually cleansed as though
they had been scrubbed with soap and water. Thinking it a pity that so
much delicious fresh water should be permitted to run to waste, I went
below and brought up several small breakers and proceeded to fill them,
one after the other, until I had the lot, numbering about twenty,
brimming full. And all this time the thunderstorm continued to rage
with unabated fury.

The filling of the breakers during the continuance of that terrific
deluge naturally r