time when people began to come and bring their books and knitting and sit on the seats.  Then he could stroll out without attracting attention.  But he had the night before him to spend as best he could.  That would not matter at all.  He could tuck his cap under his head and go to sleep on the ground.  He could command himself to waken once every half-hour and look for the lights.  He would not go to sleep until it was long past midnight—­so long past that there would not be one chance in a hundred that anything could happen.  But the clouds which made the night so dark were giving forth low rumbling growls.  At intervals a threatening gleam of light shot across them and a sudden swish of wind rushed through the trees in the garden.  This happened several times, and then Marco began to hear the patter of raindrops.  They were heavy and big drops, but few at first, and then there was a new and more powerful rush of wind, a jagged dart of light in the sky, and a tremendous crash.  After that the clouds tore themselves open and poured forth their contents in floods.  After the protracted struggle of the day it all seemed to happen at once, as if a horde of huge lions had at one moment been let loose:  flame after flame of lightning, roar and crash and sharp reports of thunder, shrieks of hurricane wind, torrents of rain, as if some tidal-wave of the skies had gathered and rushed and burst upon the earth.  It was such a storm as people remember for a lifetime and which in few lifetimes is seen at all.

Marco stood still in the midst of the rage and flooding, blinding roar of it.  After the first few minutes he knew he could do nothing to shield himself.  Down the garden paths he heard cataracts rushing.  He held his cap pressed against his eyes because he seemed to stand in the midst of darting flames.  The crashes, cannon reports and thunderings, and the jagged streams of light came so close to one another that he seemed deafened as well as blinded.  He wondered if he should ever be able to hear human voices again when it was over.  That he was drenched to the skin and that the water poured from his clothes as if he were himself a cataract was so small a detail that he was scarcely aware of it.  He stood still, bracing his body, and waited.  If he had been a Samavian soldier in the trenches and such a storm had broken upon him and his comrades, they could only have braced themselves and waited.  This was what he found himself thinking when the tumult and downpour were at their worst.  There were men who had waited in the midst of a rain of bullets.

It was not long after this thought had come to him that there occurred the first temporary lull in the storm.  Its fury perhaps reached its height and broke at that moment.  A yellow flame had torn its jagged way across the heavens, and an earth-rending crash had thundered itself into rumblings which actually died away before breaking forth again.  Marco took his cap from his eyes and drew a long breath.