It was evident that some tremendous manifestation of the power of the
Invisible was at hand; but none of us moved. Some unaccountable
fascination held us riveted to the spot. We were all spell-bound.
What, indeed, was the use of flight? Where could we have hid ourselves
from Him, to whom the darkness is as the noonday, and whose power
pervades all space? The water in the bay now began to ebb suddenly,
until it retired about twenty paces, leaving a broad white sandy beach
where before there had been but a narrow stripe of pebbles. In another
moment it again rushed in with a loud _shaling_ noise--I coin the word
for the sound--in _bores_ nearly ten feet high, and thundered against
the rocks, with a violence as if it had been the swell of the
everlasting deep, hove by a storm against their iron ribs; and flashing
up in white smoke all round us and over us. The very next moment, a
huge mass of the grey cliff above was disruptured, and thundering with
increasing bounds, pitched right over our heads (distinctly visible
between us and the sky), a pistol-shot into the sea, where it dashed
its shadow in the water into fragments, as it fell with a flash like
fire; rotten branches and sand showered down in all directions; the dew
was shaken like a fall of diamonds from the trees, the schooner's crew
shouted, birds and beasts screamed and bellowed, and the mules we rode
started and reared as the earth quaked beneath their feet, and yelled
forth the most unearthly sounds that ever issued from the throat of
quadruped. The shallop at the wharf was hove bodily forward on the
crest of a tremendous sea, like a moving mountain, and then dashed on
the shore; the schooner first dragged her anchors by the sudden and
tumultuous ebb, and then drove with inconceivable violence against the
wharf, where I thought she would have been stranded; but the retiring
surge again floated her back, and the next minute she was fast drifting
out of the bay. She had parted both cables.
We hastened home, where we found every thing in great confusion. The
house was filled with dust, the walls and roof cracked in many places,
and the wooden frames of the windows in two instances forced from their
embrasures by the sinking of the walls. The field negroes were
crowding round in great dismay, and the house servants were no less so;
but, amidst all this hubbub--lo!--the beautiful fountain was once more
bubbling, and hissing, and splashing in its rocky basin, and amongst
the leaves, as cheerily as if it had never intermitted at all.
"The old one has slaked his thirst. You see we have got back our
purling stream again, Mr Hudson," said Listado.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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