The mass of canvas at his feet leapt clear of the ground and fell two or
three yards away. He sprang to seize it, but in the same instant the whole
storm--rain, wind, and sand--whirled like a troop of fiends round the
southern end of the island, the ceaseless lightnings showing the way, and
came tearing and howling up its hither side. The white sail lifted,
bellied, rolled, fell, vaulted into the air, fell again, tumbled on, and
at the foot of a dune stopped until its wind-buffeted pursuer had almost
overtaken it. Then it fled again, faster, faster, higher, higher up the
sandy slope to its top, caught and clung an instant on some unseen bush,
and then with one mad bound into the black sky, unrolled, widened like a
phantom, and vanished forever.

Gregory turned in desperation, and in the glare of the lightning looked
back toward his raft. Great waves were rolling along and across the
slender reef in wide obliques and beating themselves to death in the
lagoon, or sweeping out of it again seaward at its more northern end. On
the dishevelled crest of one he saw his raft, and on another its mast. He
could not look a second time. The flying sand blinded him and cut the
blood from his face. He could only cover his eyes and crawl under the
bushes in such poor lee as he could find; and there, with the first lull
of the storm, heavy with exhaustion and despair, he fell asleep and slept
until far into the day. When he awoke the tempest was over.

Even more completely the tumult within him was quieted. He rose and stood
forth mute in spirit as in speech; humbled, yet content, in the
consciousness that having miserably failed first to save himself and then
to rue himself back to destruction, the hurricane had been his deliverer.
It had spared his supplies, his ammunition, his weapons, only hiding them
deeper under the dune sands; but scarce a vestige of his camp remained and
of his raft nothing. As once more from the highest sand-ridge he looked