The rains began. Seated at her window she would hear a roaring tattoo in the grove of abaca palms to the south. The noise neared, rose, thundered. Long, lithe coconuts began an inexplicable bending to and fro, their tops circling in trembling descent almost to earth, then swinging back to the spring of the bow-tense trunks in a movement exaggerated and violent like that of some stage tempest. Out of the grove, beaten, trampled down, there advanced into the open a black wall of rain, perpendicular from earth to sky. Ahead of it, dust, twigs, rubbish suddenly ascended to heaven in rotary spirals; trees were flayed of their leaves, roofs blew up like gigantic bats. Then her own house, strongly built, shook as with earthquake; the thatch of the roof sprang vertical, like hair that stiffens with fear, and between the interstices she saw the muddy sky stream by. A powder of debris, of dry rot, snowed down upon the table, the books, the chairs; little lizards, unperched, struck the floor with a squeak like that of a mechanical doll, remained as dead for long minutes, then scampered across the room and up the walls again; great black spiders, centipedes, scorpions fell; sometimes a large rat. Then the nipa clicked back to position as a box is shut; a breathless silence, a heavy immobility petrified the world. There came three or four detached, resounding raps upon the roof, and suddenly a furious, roaring beating as of stones coming down, great stones, chuted in thousands, in millions--and the church, the plaza, the mountain, the whole Land disappeared in a yellow swirl of waters. It rained thus for hours, for days, for weeks. The leaden vault of the sky seemed irreparably cracked, letting down the liquid hoardings of ages. It rained, in drops big like eggs, falling so swiftly that they welded sky to earth as with iron bars; it rained, heavily, monotonously, mournfully. The first wild, triumphant burst over, the elements seemed to have settled down to their task with a quiet, brooding patience, an immense persistence of unalterable purpose. It seemed that it would rain thus for years, for ages, for inconceivable æons. The world was rain, the future was rain; she lived in a chaos of water. The whole earth softened, dissolved; it rolled through eternity, a silent, viscous ball of ooze spattering the stars. Inside her hut a musty leprosy crept over things; her clothes rotted in her trunk, mushrooms sprang overnight upon her books; her very soul, it seemed to her, disintegrated before this malevolent persistence of elemental purpose. A black mournfulness was over her like a veil.