Pelée roared. Sullen and dreadful out of the silence voiced the Monster roused to his labor afresh. Charter darted a glance back at the darkening North, and began to run.... The crisis was not past; the holiday darkened. The ship would fill with refugees now, and the road to Fort de France turn black with flight. These were his thoughts as he ran. The lights of the day burned out one by one. The crust of the earth stretched to a cracking tension. The air was beetling with strange concussions. In the clutch of realization, Charter turned one shining look toward the woman hurrying forward on the veranda of the _Palms_.... Detonations accumulated into the crash of a thousand navies. She halted, her eyes fascinated, lost in the North. He caught her up like a child. Across the lawn, through the roaring black, he bore her, brushing her fingers and her fallen hair from his eyes. He reached the curbing of the old well with his burden, crawled over and caught the rusty chain. Incandescent tongues lapped the cistern's raised coping. There was a scream as from the souls of Night and Storm and Chaos triumphant--a mighty planetary madness--shocking magnitudes from the very core of sound! Air was sucked from the vault, from their ears and lungs by the shrieking vacuums, burned through the cushion of atmosphere by the league-long lanes of electric fire.... Running streams of red dust filtered down. It was eight on the morning of Ascension Day. _La Montagne Pelée_ was giving birth to death. TWENTY-FIFTH CHAPTER THE _SARAGOSSA_ ENCOUNTERS THE RAGING FIRE-MISTS FROM _PELÉE_ EIGHT MILES AT SEA, BUT LIVES TO SEND A BOAT ASHORE Peter Stock stared long into the faint film of smoke, until the launch bearing Charter ashore was lost in the shipping. The pale, winding sheet was unwrapped from the beauty of morning. There was an edging of rose and gold on the far dim hills. His eyes smarted from weariness, but his mind, like an automatic thing, swept around the great circle--from the ship to the city, to the plantation-house on the _Morne_ and back to the ship again. He was sick of the shore, disgusted with people who would listen to M. Mondet and not to him. Miss Wyndam had refused him so often, that he was half afraid Charter would not be successful, but he was willing to wait two hours longer, for he liked the young woman immensely, liked her breeding and her brain.... He joined Laird, his first officer, on the bridge. The latter was scrutinizing through the glass a blotch of smoke on the city-front. "What do you make of it, sir?" Laird asked. The lenses brought to the owner a nucleus of red in the black bank. The rest of Saint Pierre was a gray, doll-settlement, set in the shelter of little gray hills. He could see the riven and castellated crest of Pelée weaving his black ribbon. It was all small, silent, and unearthly. "That's a fire on the water-front," he said. "That's what I made of it, sir," Laird responded.