threatened to blow me out of it.

I had not gone far before the saddle began to turn round with me; I was
slipping to the ground. I pulled up, dismounted, undid the girths with
difficulty, set the saddle straight, then pulled at every strap with all
my might. It was to no purpose: I could not get another hole out of one
of them. I mounted and set off again; but the moment a stronger blast
came, the saddle began to turn. Then I thought of something to try:
dismounting once more, I got up on the off side. The wind now pushed me
on to the saddle, freeing it from my leverage, while I had, besides, the
use of my legs against the wind, so that we got on bravely, my Zoe and I.
But, alas! my lantern was out, and it was impossible to light it again,
so that I had now no arrow to shoot at random for my uncle's eye. Before
long we reached a tolerable cart-track, which led across the waste to a
village, and the wind being now behind us, I resumed the more comfortable
seat in the saddle.

We were going at a good speed, and had ridden, as I judged, about three
miles, when there came a great flash of lightning--not like any flash I
had ever seen before. It was neither the reflection of lightning below
the horizon, nor the sudden zigzagged blade, the very idea of force
without weight; it was the burst of a ball-headed torrent of fire from a
dark cloud, like water sudden from a mountain's heart, which went rushing
down a rugged channel, as if the cloud were indeed a mountain, and the
fire one of its cataracts. Its endurance was momentary, but its moments
might have been counted, for it lasted appreciably longer than an
ordinary flash, revealing to my eyes what remains on my mind clear as the
picture of some neighbouring tree on the skin of one slain by lightning.
The torrent tumbled down the cloud and vanished, but left with me the
vision of a man, plainly my uncle, a few hundred yards from me, on a