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Updated: May 2, 2025
If the night promised to be dark or stormy they tied up at the nearest bank. At such times the outside blackness, the howling wind, driving rain-squalls, and dashing waves only heightened the interior cosiness, the light, warmth, and general comfort of their floating home.
And so, night after night, save in the stormy season of the year, when the white rain-squalls gathered together on the windward sea-line, and swept quickly down upon the island and drenched the loose, sandy soil with pouring showers, the white man had sat with his face turned seaward to the cloudless horizon of the starlit ocean and his mind dwelling upon the ever-present memories of the past.
When the heat-cloud sucks the tempest, when the slivered pine-trees fall, When the blinding, blaring rain-squalls lash and veer; Through the war-gongs of the thunder rings a voice more loud than all It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear!
Thirty-seven monotonous days, varied only by rain-squalls and sun, by calm or threatening seas, by the changing sky. Rarely a passing schooner lifted its sail above the far circle of the horizon. It was as though we journeyed through space to another world. Yet all around us there was life life in a thousand varying forms, filling the sea and the air.
The fish, seeds, leaves, etcetera, that have fallen to the earth in rain-squalls, may have owed their elevation to the clouds to the same cause that attaches a few drops of the liquid, with its particles of impurities, to the ball."
There was a splash of wet in the air, and up to windward there was a promise of rain-squalls; and then there was the trough of the sea, cold and cruel in the moonlight, in which the Snark complacently rolled.
It was a night of rain-squalls and moonlit streaks when Pharaoh, wandering devious among the reeds, first became aware of the bittern, in the shape of reptilian green eyes steadily regarding him from the piebald shadows. Possibly the cat's whiskers first hinted at some new presence by reason of the "ancient and fish-like smell" which pervaded this precise reed jungle. Pharaoh stopped dead.
A Northeast gale off Hatteras: immense gray combers, five to the mile, charging shoreward, occasionally breaking, again lifting their heads too high in the effort, truncated as by a knife, and the liquid apex shattered to spray; an expanse of leaden sky showing between the rain-squalls, across which heavy background rushed the darker scud and storm-clouds; a passenger-steamer rolling helplessly in the trough, and a square-rigged vessel, hove to on the port tack, two miles to windward of the steamer, and drifting south toward the storm-center.
The change from the cold wet sloppy deck, with its accompaniments of darkness, driving spray, and frequent rain-squalls, to the dry warm comfort of the cabin, lighted up with the brilliant rays of its single handsome swinging-lamp, its carpeted floor and well-cushioned lockers, was agreeable in the extreme; and the sound of the gale, as it roared overhead and shrieked through the rigging, the patter and drip of the rain on the deck, and the occasional heavy "swish" of the drenching spray-showers, served but to increase the feeling of comfort which we enjoyed.
Heavy rain-squalls tore down upon the boat at short intervals, and Blackett, drenched to the skin, began to feel the first deadly chills and pains of an attack of island fever. Usually light-hearted, he now felt angry, and savagely cursed at his crew when the heavily-laden boat touched and ground against the coral knobs that lay scattered about her course.
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