Now about this time, when Robinson had been some months on the island, heavy and constant rain began to fall, and sometimes weeks would pass without a single dry day.  He found that instead of there being spring, summer, autumn, and winter, as in England, the seasons in his island were divided into the wet and the dry.  There was no cold weather, no winter.  It chanced that just before this first rain began, Robinson had emptied out some refuse from bags which had once held rice, and other grain, and he had forgotten all about having emptied them.  So he was very much astonished to find, some time afterwards, both barley and rice growing near his tent, in the shade of the rock.  The ears, when ripe, he kept to sow again, and from this very small beginning, in the course of a few seasons, he had a great quantity of grain, both for food and for sowing.  But this meant every year much hard work, for he had no plow nor harrow, and all the ground had to be dug with a clumsy spade, made from a very hard, heavy wood that grew on the island.

At first Robinson could not grind the grain that he grew, nor make bread from it.  If he could have found a large stone, slightly hollow on top, he might, by pounding the grain on it with another round stone, have made very good meal.  But all the stones he could find were too soft, and in the end he had to make a sort of mill of hard wood, in which he burnt a hollow place, and on that he pounded the grain into meal with a heavy stick.

Baking he did by building a big fire, then raking away the ashes, and putting the dough on the hot place, covered with a kind of basin made of clay, over which he heaped the red ashes.  In this way very good bread can be made.

Before the rainy season was over, and just after he had finished the fence round his tent, one day when Robinson was at work in the cave, all of a sudden the earth began to fall from the roof, and the strong props he had put in cracked in a way which frightened him terribly.  At the same time there was a curious moaning, rumbling noise, that he could not understand.  He rushed out, and so afraid was he that the roof was falling in, and that he should be buried, that he got over the fence and began to run.

But he was even more frightened when he found that all the ground was shaking.  Then he knew that this was an earthquake.

Three times there came violent shocks; a huge rock about half a mile away fell with a great noise like thunder, and the sea was churned up as if by a whirlwind.  Robinson was sick with the movement of the ground, and trembling with the dread of being swallowed by the earth as it cracked and gaped; and after the noise and shaking were over, he was too frightened to go back to his tent, but sat where he was, all the time expecting another shock.

Suddenly a furious wind began to blow, tearing up trees by the roots, and lashing the water till nothing could be seen but foam and flying spray.  The air was full of branches and leaves torn off by the hurricane, and birds in hundreds were swept helpless out to sea.  In about three hours, as suddenly as it had begun, the wind fell, and there was a dead calm, followed by rain such as Robinson had never before seen, which soaked him to the skin, and forced him to return to the cave, where he sat in great fear.