, and
the watery waste shine out every moment in the wide gleam of
lightnings still hidden by the wood, and are wrapped again in
ever-thickening darkness over which thunders roll and jar, and answer
one another across the sky. Then, like a charge of ten thousand
lancers, come the wind and the rain, their onset covered by all the
artillery of heaven. The lightnings leap, hiss, and blaze; the
thunders crack and roar; the rain lashes; the waters writhe; the wind
smites and howls. For five, for ten, for twenty minutes,--for an hour,
for two hours,--the sky and the flood are never for an instant wholly
dark, or the thunder for one moment silent; but while the universal
roar sinks and swells, and the wide, vibrant illumination shows all
things in ghostly half-concealment, fresh floods of lightning every
moment rend the dim curtain and leap forth; the glare of day falls
upon the swaying wood, the reeling, bowing, tossing willows, the
seething waters, the whirling rain, and in the midst the small form of
the distressed steamer, her revolving paddle-wheels toiling behind to
lighten the strain upon her anchor-chains; then all are dim ghosts
again, while a peal, as if the heavens were rent, rolls off around the
sky, comes back in shocks and throbs, and sinks in a long roar that
before it can die is swallowed up in the next flash and peal.

The deserted lugger is riding out the tornado. Whirled one moment this
way and another that, now and again taking in water, her
forest-shelter breaks the force of many a gust that would have
destroyed her out in the open. But in the height of the storm her poor
substitute for an anchor lets go its defective hold on the rushy
bottom and drags, and the little vessel backs, backs, into the
willows. She escapes such entanglement as would capsize her, and by
and by, when the wind lulls for a moment and then comes with all its
wrath from the opposite direction, she swings clear again and drags
back nearly to her first mooring and lies there, swinging, tossing,
and surviving still,--a den of snakes.

The tempest was still fierce, though abating, and the lightning still
flashed, but less constantly, when at a point near the lugger the
pirogue came out of the forest, laboring against the wind and
half-filled with water. On the face of the storm-beaten man in it each
gleam of the lightning showed the pallid confession of mortal terror.
Where that frail shell had been, or how often it had cast its occupa