I daresay I slept two or three hours; it may have been more or less, I don’t know, but the next moment of consciousness, or semi-consciousness, was an uneasy feeling that a thief was trying to carry off a large tin bath that belonged to me, in my dream.  As he dragged it away it seemed to me that he bumped it with all his might, making a horrible row.  Meanwhile, oppressed by nightmare, I could not budge an inch nor utter a cry, though I would have given the world to stop the thief.  I daresay this nonsense of my dream occupied but an instant of time.  I woke to the consciousness of a loud peal of thunder.  “We are in for a storm,” thought I, turning drowsily on my other side, not yet much awake to the probable consequences.

There was no sleep for me, however.  The rest of the party were, one and all, up and moving about; and the noise of the storm also increased—­the flashes of lightning were blinding, and the crash of the thunder was almost simultaneous.  Through the open side of our hut I could see and hear the rain descending in torrents; fortunately it did not beat in, but it was not long before the wet penetrated the roof—­that roof of leaves that I had mentally condemned the day before.  After the rain once came through, the ground was soon soaking.

It was a dismal scene.  I sat up with the others, “the lanterns dimly burning,” and occupied myself for some time contriving gurgoyles at different angles of my body, but the wet would trickle down my neck.

We made a small fire inside the hut, essaying thereby to dry some of our things.  My socks were soaking; my boots, I found, had a considerable storage of water; the only dry thing was my throat, made dry by swallowing the wood-smoke.  A more complete transformation scene could hardly be imagined than our present woeful guise compared with the merriment of the supper-table, where all was song and jollity.

A German, who was sitting on the same log with myself, looking the picture of misery, had been one of the most jovial songsters of the evening.

“Thousand devils!” said he, “you could wring me like a rag.  This abominable hut is a sponge—­a mere reservoir of water.”

“Oh, well, it is all part of the fun,” said I, turning the water out of my boots, and proceeding to toast my socks by the fire on the thorns of a twig.  “Suppose we sing a song.  What shall it be?—­’The meeting of the waters’?”

I had intended a mild joke, but the Teuton relapsed into grim silence.

The storm after a while appeared to be rolling off.  The thunder-claps were not so immediately over our heads, and the flashes of lightning were less frequent; in fact a perfect lull existed for a short space of time, marking the passage probably to an oppositely electrified zone of the thunder-cloud.  During this brief lull we were startled by hearing all at once a frightful yelling from the quarter where the Wallacks were camping, a little higher up than our hut.