That Tuesday morning the sun rose fiery red out of the steaming Guinea jungles to the east of us, across its lower half two narrow black bars sinister. It looked as if it had blood in its eye, while the still, heavy, brooding air felt to be ominous of evil, harboring devilment of some sort. All the mess were cross-grained, silent, or irritable, raw-edged for the first time, for a better lot of fellows one could not ask to ship with. Nor throughout the day did weather conditions or tempers improve. All day long the sky was heavily overcast with dense, low-hanging, dark gray clouds, which, while wholly obscuring the sun, seemed to focus its rays upon us like a vast burning-glass; wherefore it was expedient for the two pajama-clad passengers to keep well within the shelter of the bridge-deck awning. Toward sunset, a dense black wall of cloud settled upon the western horizon, aft of us. But suddenly, just at the moment the sun must have been descending below the horizon to the south of it, the black wall of cloud slowly parted, and the opening so made widened until it became an enormous oval, reaching from horizon half-way to zenith, framing a scene of astounding beauty and grandeur. Range after range of cloud crests that looked like mountain folds rose one above another, with the appearance of vast intervening space between, some of the ranges a most delicate blue or pink, some opalescent, some gloriously gilded, while behind the farthest and tallest range, at what seemed an inconceivably remote distance, but in a perspective entirely harmonious with the foreground, appeared the sky itself, a soft luminous straw-yellow in color, flecked thickly over with tiny snow-white cloudlets. It was like a glimpse into another and more beautiful world than ours--the actual celestial world. But, whether or not ominous of our future, we were permitted no more than a brief glimpse of it, for presently the pall of black cloud fell like a vast drop curtain and shut it from our sight. Then night came down upon us, black, starless, forbidding, although in the absence of any fall of the barometer nothing more than a downpour of rain was expected. But shortly after I had gone to sleep, at two o'clock suddenly something in the nature of a tropical tornado flew up and struck us hard. I was awakened by a tremendous crash on the bridge-deck above my cabin, a heeling over of the ship that nearly dumped me out of my berth, and what seemed like a solid spout of water pouring in through my open weather porthole, with the wind howling a devil's death-song through the rigging and an uninterrupted smash--bang! above my head.