From the way things developed for the next couple of minutes this appeared to be just about what was going to happen, however. I cannot recall ever having felt more panicky in my life than when I saw that that fore-running tongue of wind, which had originally come charging round the bend from east, had now circled southward along the bluffs below the farmhouses and was heading straight back into the east again. That meant that I was now occupying the almost mathematical centre of the vortex of a real "twister"--that I was about to be rocked on the bosom of a fairly husky young cyclone. Something pronounced in the way of an uplift movement was inevitably due the moment that back-curving tongue of air lapped round to the place it started from. A whimsical comparison flashed across my mind in watching through the crook of my fending arm the witch-dance of that circling blast. In some town up-river I had seen a movie of the Custer Massacre, at the climacteric moment of which the howling hordes of Gall and Rain-in-the-Face and Crazy-Horse whirled in a wide circle round their doomed victims, the mental agonies of which latter were shown in successive cut-ins of close-ups. Now I was once assured by a world-famous movie star that he always actually felt in his heart--to the very depths of his being--the emotion he was called on to register, was it murderous lust, ineffable virtue, mother-love or what-not. Very well. Assuming this to be true of all great movie actors, I have very grave doubt if any of that silver-screen last-stand battalion of Custer's felt any more real a pricking of the scalp in watching the closing circle of dancing Redskins than did I in waiting for that spinning blast of wind to decide whether or not it was going to stage a "Pick-me-up" party. It is not quite clear in my mind even now why things in my immediate vicinity did not start to aviate. Several loosely built structures on the bluff went flying off like autumn leaves, and wind enough to blow boards into tree-tops would have at least sent my boat rolling if not sky-ing. I am inclined to think, however, that the failure of any marked heliocoptic action to develop was due to a lack of pronounced opposition on the part of a bluffing turncoat of a southwesterly wind. The latter skirmished just long enough to turn in the vanguards of the main storm, but took to its heels the moment the thunderbolt phalanx was launched upon it. It was the advent of this Juggernaut that marked the end of my consecutive impressions. Primal Chaos simply clapped the lid down over me and kept it there for several aeons--fifteen minutes to be exact.