England disappeared.  The fugitives had now nothing round them but the sea.

All at once night grew awful.

There was no longer extent nor space; the sky became blackness, and closed in round the vessel.  The snow began to fall slowly; a few flakes appeared.  They might have been ghosts.  Nothing else was visible in the course of the wind.  They felt as if yielded up.  A snare lurked in every possibility.

It is in this cavernous darkness that in our climate the Polar waterspout makes its appearance.

A great muddy cloud, like to the belly of a hydra, hung over ocean, and in places its lividity adhered to the waves.  Some of these adherences resembled pouches with holes, pumping the sea, disgorging vapour, and refilling themselves with water.  Here and there these suctions drew up cones of foam on the sea.

The boreal storm hurled itself on the hooker.  The hooker rushed to meet it.  The squall and the vessel met as though to insult each other.

In the first mad shock not a sail was clewed up, not a jib lowered, not a reef taken in, so much is flight a delirium.  The mast creaked and bent back as if in fear.

Cyclones, in our northern hemisphere, circle from left to right, in the same direction as the hands of a watch, with a velocity which is sometimes as much as sixty miles an hour.  Although she was entirely at the mercy of that whirling power, the hooker behaved as if she were out in moderate weather, without any further precaution than keeping her head on to the rollers, with the wind broad on the bow so as to avoid being pooped or caught broadside on.  This semi-prudence would have availed her nothing in case of the wind’s shifting and taking her aback.

A deep rumbling was brewing up in the distance.  The roar of the abyss, nothing can be compared to it.  It is the great brutish howl of the universe.  What we call matter, that unsearchable organism, that amalgamation of incommensurable energies, in which can occasionally be detected an almost imperceptible degree of intention which makes us shudder, that blind, benighted cosmos, that enigmatical Pan, has a cry, a strange cry, prolonged, obstinate, and continuous, which is less than speech and more than thunder.  That cry is the hurricane.  Other voices, songs, melodies, clamours, tones, proceed from nests, from broods, from pairings, from nuptials, from homes.  This one, a trumpet, comes out of the Naught, which is All.  Other voices express the soul of the universe; this one expresses the monster.  It is the howl of the formless.  It is the inarticulate finding utterance in the indefinite.  A thing it is full of pathos and terror.  Those clamours converse above and beyond man.  They rise, fall, undulate, determine waves of sound, form all sorts of wild surprises for the mind, now burst close to the ear with the importunity of a peal of trumpets, now assail us with the rumbling hoarseness of distance.  Giddy uproar which resembles