refilling themselves with water. Here and there these suctions drew up
cones of foam on the sea.

The boreal storm hurled itself on the hooker. The hooker rushed to meet
it. The squall and the vessel met as though to insult each other.

In the first mad shock not a sail was clewed up, not a jib lowered, not
a reef taken in, so much is flight a delirium. The mast creaked and bent
back as if in fear.

Cyclones, in our northern hemisphere, circle from left to right, in the
same direction as the hands of a watch, with a velocity which is
sometimes as much as sixty miles an hour. Although she was entirely at
the mercy of that whirling power, the hooker behaved as if she were out
in moderate weather, without any further precaution than keeping her
head on to the rollers, with the wind broad on the bow so as to avoid
being pooped or caught broadside on. This semi-prudence would have
availed her nothing in case of the wind's shifting and taking her aback.

A deep rumbling was brewing up in the distance. The roar of the abyss,
nothing can be compared to it. It is the great brutish howl of the
universe. What we call matter, that unsearchable organism, that
amalgamation of incommensurable energies, in which can occasionally be
detected an almost imperceptible degree of intention which makes us
shudder, that blind, benighted cosmos, that enigmatical Pan, has a cry,
a strange cry, prolonged, obstinate, and continuous, which is less than
speech and more than thunder. That cry is the hurricane. Other voices,
songs, melodies, clamours, tones, proceed from nests, from broods, from
pairings, from nuptials, from homes. This one, a trumpet, comes out of
the Naught, which is All. Other voices express the soul of the universe;