Never had I stood there before on such a night, or with such a heavy heart. I wished that I had not come, and yet I was afraid to go. The darkness had closed in upon me till I could almost feel it, and knowing that a single step in the wrong direction might cost me my life, I dared not move. Suddenly the heaviness of the atmosphere was explained. The sky above me seemed to be rent aside to let out a great blaze of vivid light which flashed, glittering and fiercely brilliant, right across the arc of the heavens, sinking at last into the horizon of the sea, which it showed me for a moment with a lurid light, green and disturbed. Almost on its heels came the thunder, and I trembled as I listened. It seemed as if the hills were one by one splitting open with a great crash all around me, and the ground on which I stood shook. Again the lightning was scattered all over the inky sky, giving me ghastly peeps at sections of the patch-worky landscape below, and once it flashed down the conductor of Porlock steeple, showing me the little town as distinctly as I had ever seen it. A gale sprung up with marvellous suddenness; the moaning of the pine-trees became an angry shrieking, and the roar of the sea far away below became a deafening thunder. Black clouds and grey mists came rolling along, sometimes enveloping me, and sometimes passing so close above my head that I could feel their moisture, and, by stretching out my hand, could almost have touched them. Every now and then above the storm I could hear the piteous bleating of the mountain sheep, as they rushed frantically about seeking in vain for shelter which the bare hillside could not afford them. For the rain was coming down in sheets, blinding, driving sheets, and already the swollen mountain streams were making themselves heard above all the din, as they swept down into the Porlock valley.