To the right hand, directly over the cocoa-nut trees, these fibres, or shreds of clouds, were in the most active motion, and began to twirl and whisk round into a spinning black tube, shaped like the trunk of an elephant; the widest end blending into the thickest of the arch above, while the lower swayed about, with an irregular but ponderous oscillation; lengthening and stretching towards the trees, one moment in a dense column, as if they had _attracted_ it, and the next contracting with the speed of light, as if it had as suddenly been _repelled_ by them, leaving only a transparent phantom-like track of dark shreds in the air, to show where it had shrunk from. There, it lengthens again, as if it once more felt an affinity for the sharp spiculæ of the leaves, that seem to erect themselves to meet it. It almost touched them--flash--the electric fluid sparked out and _up_, either from the cocoa-nut trees themselves, or through them as conductors from the sandy spit on which they grew. I saw it distinctly; but the next moment the pent gale, as if it had burst some invisible barrier that confined it, gushed down as suddenly as it had taken off, and stronger than before. I was blinded and almost suffocated by the heaviest shower ever dashed by wind in the face of mortal man--the _debris_, so to speak, of the vanished waterspout; I can compare it to nothing but being exposed to the jet of a fire-engine. A column of dense black smoke, thickly starred with red sparks, now boiled up past the edge of the cliff under me--presently it became streaked with tongues of bright hissing flame, which ran up the rigging, diverging along every rope, as if it had been a galvanic wire, twisting, serpent-like, round the Mosca's masts and higher spars, and licking the wet furled sails like boa-constrictors fitting their prey to be devoured. See how the fire insinuates itself into the dry creases of the canvass, driving out the moisture from the massive folds in white steam; now the sails catch in earnest--they drop in glowing flakes of tinder from the yards--there the blue and white pennant and ensign are scorched away, and blow off in tiny flashes; while in the lulls of the gale we distinctly hear the roaring and crackling of the fire, as it rages in the hull of the doomed vessel below. "I say, Quacco, mind we don't get a hoist, my man--see we be not too near--there, don't you hear how the guns go off as the metal gets heated, for there is not a soul on board?"