‘And so saying, the bold mutineer left the cabin. Tronda followed him on deck, muttering her Lapland rhymes, and waving her arms aloft in the air. As she did so, great banks of black clouds began to rise from out the ocean, and the sea-birds flew round the masts of the galley, screaming with affright. There was a dead calm in the air, and it grew so hot that the mariners gasped for breath. The bright tropic day, shipmates, seemed to be changing into night, and the clouds got lower and lower until they appeared to rest upon the topmasts of the galley. All this time the witch was kneeling upon the poop, chanting her accursed rhymes, and Torquil was standing alone beside the mainmast, for his comrades were terrified, and slunk away from him as from a man under a curse. ‘Suddenly the witch stopped, and shaded back from her eyes her long flowing hair, gazing intently at the sky. In the next moment, a flash of lightning—so bright that every one on board the galley, except the sorceress, was dazzled and blinded by the glare—tore out of the dark heavens; struck the main topmast of the galley; and with a crash, like that of all the artillery in the world fired off in one salvo, passed gleaming down the wood, shaking the ship as though she had been lifted a hundred feet, and then allowed to fall splash into the sea. The explosion was followed by a thick sulphurous smoke, which seemed to come steaming up out of the inmost recesses of the galley, and while the crew, blinded and almost choking in the yellow sulphurous fume, were groping about the deck, they heard the loud screaming laughter of the witch, followed by the croak of the ravens from the cabin. ‘At length the smoke or mist gradually cleared away, and as it did so, and the men recovered their eyesight, they saw Tronda standing as usual on the poop, with her old aspect of haughty command. Her first words, comrades, were— ‘“Fling that carrion into the sea, and take warning by the fate of Torquil Randa how you dispute the will of such as I.” ‘So the sailors advanced, all trembling, to the foot of the mainmast, where lay the body of the man of whom the witch spoke. He had been struck by the lightning, comrades, but there was neither scaith nor scar upon his flesh, only on the forehead a small round blue spot. So the mariners lifted up the body, and while it was yet warm plunged it over the side. It sunk feet first, and as the head disappeared, the crew thought that the dead face frowned.