Such a hurricane Felix had never before experienced.  Its energy was awful.  Round the palm-trees the wind played a frantic and capricious devil’s dance.  It pirouetted about the atoll in the mad glee of unconsciousness.  Here and there it cleared lanes, hundreds of yards in length, among the forest-trees and the cocoanut plantations.  The noise of snapping and falling trunks rang thick on the air.  At times the cyclone would swoop down from above upon the swaying stem of some tall and stately palm that bent like grass before the wind, break it off short with a roar at the bottom, and lay it low at once upon the ground, with a crash like thunder.  In other places, little playful whirlwinds seemed to descend from the sky in the very midst of the dense brushwood, where they cleared circular patches, strewn thick under foot with trunks and branches in their titanic sport, and yet left unhurt all about the surrounding forest.  Then again a special cyclone of gigantic proportions would advance, as it were, in a single column against one stem of a clump, whirl round it spirally like a lightning flash, and, deserting it for another, leave it still standing, but turned and twisted like a screw by the irresistible force of its invisible fingers.  The storm-god, said Toko, was dancing with the palm-trees.  The sight was awful.  Such destructive energy Felix had never even imagined before.  No wonder the savages all round beheld in it the personal wrath of some mighty spirit.

For in spite of the black clouds they could see it all—­both the Europeans and the islanders.  The intense darkness of the night was lighted up for them every minute by an almost incessant blaze of sheet and forked lightning.  The roar of the thunder mingled with the roar of the tempest, each in turn overtopping and drowning the other.  The hut where Felix and Muriel sheltered themselves shook before the storm; the very ground of the island trembled and quivered—­like the timbers of a great ship before a mighty sea—­at each onset of the breakers upon the surrounding fringe-reef.  And side by side with it all, to crown their misery, wild torrents of rain, descending in waterspouts, as it seemed, or dashed in great sheets against the roof of their frail tenement, poured fitfully on with fierce tropical energy.

In the midst of the hut Muriel crouched and prayed with bloodless lips to Heaven.  This was too, too terrible.  It seemed incredible to her that on top of all they had been called upon to suffer of fear and suspense at the hands of the savages, the very dumb forces of nature themselves should thus be stirred up to open war against them.  Her faith in Providence was sorely tried.  Dumb forces, indeed!  Why, they roared with more terrible voices than any wild beast on earth could possibly compass.  The thunder and the wind were howling each other down in emulous din, and the very hiss of the lightning could be distinctly heard, like some huge snake, at times above the creaking and snapping of the trees before the gale in the surrounding forest.