In different localities, different aspects of the Tempest. In Africa you have the _upas_, the fierce compound of _simoom_ and _tornado_. The atmosphere seems calm and clear, and yet you feel a strange oppression of the lungs and a general anxiety as terrible as it is strange. Then a black cloud, "no bigger than a man's hand," appears on the horizon, approaches with lightning speed, lengthening, widening, and deepening as it approaches (_vires acquirit eundo_) the storm descends, and in a quarter of an hour all around is devastated, utterly ruined, and ships have utterly disappeared. Nature takes no heed of such small matters. About Sumatra and Bengal, you see in the evening or night (never in the morning) a dark arched cloud in the sky. It rapidly increases, and presently, from that dark cloud, come down flashes and sheets of pale and ghastly lights. Woe to the mariner who shall encounter the first wind that rushes from that sinister cloud; he will pretty certainly go down. But the ordinary form is that of a huge funnel. A sailor, who was caught in one of these terrible storms, says: "I found myself, as it were, at the bottom of an enormous crater of a volcano; all around was darkness, above a glimmering of lurid lights." That light is what is technically termed "_the eye of the Tempest_." When the Water spout, the horrible Typhoon, empties itself, human science and human daring are of no avail. Roaring, howling, shrieking, hissing, the storm fiends are at work above, below, around the luckless vessel. Suddenly there is a dead, a quite horrible silence, and there comes forth, seemingly, from the very centre of the water spout, a blinding flash, and a deafening report, and when you, at length, recover power to look aloft, you find that mast and spars have been shivered. Seymour tells us that, sometimes, after being caught in one of those horrible Typhoons the sailors, for a long time, have blackened nails and weakened sight. Sometimes, too, this terrible Typhoon sucks up not only air and water, but also the luckless ship, holds it suspended in the air, and then dashes it rudely down into the watery abyss. From this terrible action and pitiless power of the Typhoon, the Chinese derived their notion of the terrible mother _Typhon_, who, hovering in the sky, picks out her victims and is ever conceiving and bearing the _Ken Woo_, whirlwinds of fire and iron. To that terrible _Typhon_ they have erected temples and altars, adoring her and praying to her in the vain hope of humanising her. The brave Piddington had no adoration to spare for her; on the contrary, he gives her a marvellously ill name. He calls her an only too strong corsair, a pirate so strong and so tricky that there is no dishonor in getting out of her way.