The nearest mainland,--across mad Caillou Bay to the
sea-marshes,--lay twelve miles north; west, by the Gulf, the
nearest solid ground was twenty miles distant. There were boats,
yes!--but the stoutest swimmer might never reach them now!

Then rose a frightful cry,--the hoarse, hideous, indescribable
cry of hopeless fear,--the despairing animal-cry man utters when
suddenly brought face to face with Nothingness, without
preparation, without consolation, without possibility of respite
... Sauve qui peut! Some wrenched down the doors; some clung to
the heavy banquet-tables, to the sofas, to the billiard.
tables:--during one terrible instant,--against fruitless
heroisms, against futile generosities,--raged all the frenzy of
selfishness, all the brutalities of panic. And then--then came,
thundering through the blackness, the giant swells, boom on boom!
... One crash!--the huge frame building rocks like a cradle,
seesaws, crackles. What are human shrieks now?--the tornado is
shrieking! Another!--chandeliers splinter; lights are dashed out;
a sweeping cataract hurls in: the immense hall
rises,--oscillates,--twirls as upon a
pivot,--crepitates,--crumbles into ruin. Crash again!--the
swirling wreck dissolves into the wallowing of another monster
billow; and a hundred cottages overturn, spin in sudden eddies,
quiver, disjoint, and melt into the seething.

... So the hurricane passed,--tearing off the heads of the
prodigious waves, to hurl them a hundred feet in air,--heaping up
the ocean against the land,--upturning the woods. Bays and
passes were swollen to abysses; rivers regorged; the sea-marshes
were changed to raging wastes of water. Before New Orleans the