A dull unnatural light preceded the winds, and notwithstanding the previous darkness, the nature of the accident was fully apparent to all.  Even the untamed spirits that had just been bent upon so fierce a sacrifice to their superstitious dread, uttered cries of horror, while the piercing shriek of Adelheid sounded, in that fearful moment, as if beings of super-human attributes were riding in the gale.  The name of Sigismund was heard, too, in one of those wild appeals that the frantic suffer to escape them, in their despair.  But the interval between the plunge into the water and the swoop of the tempest was so short, that, to the senses of the travellers, the whole seemed the occurrence of the same teeming moment.

Maso had completed his work on the forecasts, had seen that other provisions which he had ordered were duly made, and had reached the tiller, just in time to witness and to understand all that occurred.  Adelheid and her female attendants were already lashed to the principal masts, and ropes were given to the others around her, as indispensable precautions; for the deck of the bark, now cleared of every particle of its freight, was as exposed and as defenceless against the power of the wind, as a naked heath.  Such was the situation of the Winkelried, when the omens of the night changed to their dread reality.

Instinct, in cases of sudden and unusual danger must do the office of reason.  There was no necessity to warn the unthinking but panic-struck crowd to provide for their own safety, for every man in the centre of the barge threw his body flaon the deck, and grasped the cords that Maso had taken care to provide for that purpose, with the tenacity with which all who possess life cling to the means of existence.  The dogs gave beautiful proofs of the secret and wonderful means that nature has imparted, to answer the ends of their creation.  Old Uberto crouched, cowering, and oppressed with a sense of helplessness, at the side of his master, while the Newfoundland follower of the mariner went leaping from gangway to gangway, snuffing the heated air, and barking wildly, as if he would challenge the elements to close for the strife.

A vast body of warm air had passed unheeded athwart the bark, during the minute that preceded the intended sacrifice of Balthazar.  It was the forerunner of the hurricane, which had chased it from the bed where it had been sleeping, since the warm and happy noon-tide.  Ten thousand chariots at their speed could not have equalled the rumbling that succeeded, when the winds came booming over the lake.  As if too eager to permit anything within their fangs to escape, they brought with them a wild, dull light, which filled while it clouded the atmosphere, and which, it was scarcely fanciful to imagine, had been hurried down, in their vortex, from those chill glaciers, where they had so long been condensing their forces for the present descent.  The waves were not increased, but depressed by the pressure of this atmospheric column, though it took up hogshead, of water from their crests, scattering it in fine penetrating spray, till the entire space between the heavens and the earth seemed saturated with its particles.