Daylight went
out instantly and a prolonged moan came from the distant east.
Blinding flashes of lightning illuminated the whirling mass and almost
absolute darkness fell after each bolt. Out of the inky midnight
toward the east came an ever-increasing sound of a maddened sea,
gathering in volume and fury and menace. Kenkenes flung himself on his
face and waited.
He did not have long to wait.
With a noise of mighty rending, reinforced by a continuous roll of
savage thunder, the storm struck. A spinning cone of wind caught a
great expanse of sand, and lifting the loose covering, carried a huge
twisting column inland--death and entombment for any living thing it
met. With it went a great blast of spray, stones, sea-weed, masses of
sedge uprooted bodily, much wreckage, palm trees, small huts which went
to pieces as they were carried along, wild and domestic animals,
anything and everything that lay in the path of the storm.
The rotatory movement passed with the first whirl, but a hurricane,
blowing with overcoming velocity, pressed like a wall against anything
that strove to face it. Its hoarse raving filled Kenkenes' ears with
titanic sound. The breath was snatched from his nostrils; his eyelids,
tightly closed, were stung with sharply driven sand.
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