The Foot of Time: A Novel of Australia and the South Seas: (1933)

162 THE FOOT OF TIME
than they cared to witness. And then the sun went
out like a snuffed candle, and still the wind increased,
until it became a thing unlike air at all.
A tree down below was uprooted, coconuts were
falling like hail. The power of the wind was
amazing. It broke down the doors of huts, went
inside them, then, failing to find an exit and the
opposite wall offering a stout resistance, the wind
lifted the whole but bodily and sailed away with
it; carried it to sea, where it fell in the lagoon with
a crash which would have been sickening had they
been able to hear it.
More natives were seen taking to the trees, walking
up them.
Suddenly Molota let out a shriek. "Bruce, look!
It is Tamli—Tamli, my cousin, and Monsieur Brian
Pinkerton, your good friend."
Frozen with horror, Bruce saw Tamli tie
her feet together. Then she doubled her body
grasped the tree, pressed the soles of her feet to it,
and began to walk up the trunk. She had urged
Brian to follow her, and now they saw a great
hulk of a fellow sling Brian across his body, and,
supporting the boy, carry him willy-nilly after his
adopted wife. The tree was fully fifty-five feet
from the ground. The three reached the top and
sat, held to it by the force of the wind. The coconuts
had all fallen long before. The trunk swayed
sickeningly. Then the wind, rising even more,
forced the tree over at an incline of half a right
angle and more, and kept it there. The trunk could
not get back, but vibrated with frightful shudder-
THE FOOT OF TIME 163
ing. As Bruce and Molota watched it and scores
of others like it, to their horror the tree came clean
out of the ground near the shore. An awful wave
came up from the lagoon, woolly white with foam.
High up the beach and beyond it to the trees it
carried, caught up the fallen tree and its late occupants
and carried them back. They saw a brown
arm wave, then a lighter head appear, then the sea
took them, and Bruce knew he was the only white
man left alive on Tuamonti.
Another treetop snapped off short with its human
load. The wind took it, carried it through the air
far out into the water; carried it like an inside-out
umbrella, and all aboard with it. The sea devoured
them and came up for more.
Huts were going down like ninepins, going down,
and then going up again upside down. The wind
still increased. Never in his wildest imaginings
could Bruce have realised air in motion to be like
this unspeakably appalling, living scythe. People
were lifted up and borne high in the air, then
dropped into the sea. The splashes from the sea
smashed faces like an open palm. Breathing became
impossible. Hundreds died down there, drowned,
mangled, choked. From high above them a prodigious
rock, lately exposed to the wind, fell off the
mountain side. The noise it made actually got
through the unspeakable screeching howl of the
hurricane. icnane. Molota shivered and clung to Bruce,
The wind was like water—solid. Bruce caught
a brief sample of it—an eddy; it seemed to strangle
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