ir across the entrance to the tank
was as if artillery practice on an immense scale were going on. There
was a screaming sound as if shells were hurtling through space. Now
the pitch blackness of the night was a solid mass; then it was red and
livid like a recent bruise; and then again, with a crackle like the
discharge of a Maxim, vivid flashes of white fire split the air.
Thunder rolled continuously and lightning played without stopping, in a
way which is seen and heard only on a battle-field or during a tornado
in the desert. It sounded as if the pent-up fury of a thousand years
had suddenly been let loose upon that little collection of houses on
the vast barren plain.

Down in the tank it was as dark as a tomb. The boys were close to one
another, crouched against the wall, unable to move through sheer
amazement. Peter stood up and looked out through the entrance,
expecting every moment to hear the sound of houses being torn up from
their foundations and flung down again many yards distant, mere heaps
of splintered wood and twisted iron, with perhaps mangled human corpses
in the wreckage. But such a sound did not come.

The tornado lasted about three minutes--that was all--and then it
passed, and all those tremendous sounds became muffled in the distance
as it retreated.

Gradually the stunned senses of the boys began to recover, and they
heard Peter speaking. "It missed us," he was saying. "It came pretty
close, though. I thought the hotel was gone for a cert." Then he
struck a match and held it to his pipe. The little light flared up
steadily and showed two boys in pyjamas, the smooth cement walls of the
tank, and the bushman in his shirt and trousers, but without his boots.
It showed also a cat which had died a long time ago, and which had been
dried up by the great heat. The sight of the squashed cat was so
funny, down in the tank, that the boys started to laugh. It was a
relief to do so after the strain of the last few minutes.

"We'd better get out of this," said Peter, throwing the match at the
cat and starting to climb up an iron ladder. "Were you lads much
scared?"

It was so evident that they had been very much scared that their
emphatic denial of it made them all laugh again. "I tell you, I was,"
confessed the bushman. "I reckoned the whole town was going to glory.
It would have, too, if the wind had struck it. The thing must have
turned off before it got here."

Such tornadoes as