T H E W I N D 167 



whipped into long streamers by the wind. The roar could be 

 heard for miles. 



The spray drenched my clothing when I passed. Even though 

 I crawled far back into the tangled vegetation, the wind carried 

 the moisture yards inland. The land here was very low to the 

 water's surface, seven or eight feet at most. The waves appeared 

 ready to overflow at any moment. In some time long past this 

 very thing had happened when a hurricane had burst on this 

 section of coast, for although time had smoothed out the evi- 

 dences of violence, the fury of the long distant storm was still 

 visible everywhere. Back of the level bench of gray stone which 

 fronted the beach was piled a huge rampart of monstrous boul- 

 ders which had been wrenched from the sea's edge. Mixed with 

 these were huge masses of brain coral and yard-thick branching 

 trunks of madrepores which could have come only from the 

 bottom of the sea. Some of these lay half buried a hundred 

 yards from the breakers; a hundred feet down were the living 

 counterparts of the dead masses on dry land. It did not seem 

 within the bounds of possibility that any wave could have ac- 

 complished this feat. The wind on that terrible day must have 

 screamed at a hundred and fifty miles an hour. For miles around 

 the land must have been awash; the waves that came pounding 

 in must have hit the cKff at the island's edge with the roar of a 

 dozen cannon, must have spouted a hundred feet into the air, 

 to be caught and flung by the shrieking wind in a tearing, blind- 

 ing deluge of hundreds of tons of water. In this maelstrom 

 the surge of the moving mountains must have swept down to 

 the ocean bottom, scouring the sea floor and tearing loose the 

 living coral. These had been flung high above the rampart and 

 then rolled by the wash into the drowned valley behind. 



The rampart provided some little shelter from the wind. 

 A short distance down the coast the tangled vegetation melted 

 away and there opened up a long narrow valley which ran 



