Several hundred natives had taken to the trees, and he could have
laughed at the bunches of human fruit clustering in the tops. Then,
being Tahitian-born, he doubled his body at the waist, clasped the
trunk of his tree with his hands, pressed the soles of his feet
against the near surface of the trunk, and began to walk up the tree.
At the top he found two women, two children, and a man. One little
girl clasped a housecat in her arms.

From his eyrie he waved his hand to Captain Lynch, and that doughty
patriarch waved back. Raoul was appalled at the sky. It had approached
much nearer--in fact, it seemed just over his head; and it had turned
from lead to black. Many people were still on the ground grouped about
the bases of the trees and holding on. Several such clusters were
praying, and in one the Mormon missionary was exhorting. A weird
sound, rhythmical, faint as the faintest chirp of a far cricket,
enduring but for a moment, but in the moment suggesting to him vaguely
the thought of heaven and celestial music, came to his ear. He glanced
about him and saw, at the base of another tree, a large cluster of
people holding on by ropes and by one another. He could see their
faces working and their lips moving in unison. No sound came to him,
but he knew that they were singing hymns.

Still the wind continued to blow harder. By no conscious process could
he measure it, for it had long since passed beyond all his experience
of wind; but he knew somehow, nevertheless, that it was blowing
harder. Not far away a tree was uprooted, flinging its load of human
beings to the ground. A sea washed across the strip of sand, and they
were gone. Things were happening quickly. He saw a brown shoulder and
a black head silhouetted against the churning white of the lagoon. The
next instant that, too, had vanished. Other trees were going, falling