A thousand deaths by Jack London

clasped a housecat in her arms.

From his eyrie he waved his hand to Captain Lynch, and that doughty patriarch

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11

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 and criss-crossing like matches. He was amazed at

the power of the wind. His own tree was swaying perilously, one woman was

wailing and clutching the little girl, who in turn still hung on to the cat.

The man, holding the other child, touched Raoul’s arm and pointed. He looked

and saw the Mormon church careering drunkenly a hundred feet away. It had been

torn from its foundations, and wind and sea were heaving and shoving it toward

the lagoon. A frightful wall of water caught it, tilted it, and flung it

against half a dozen cocoanut trees. The bunches of human fruit fell like ripe

cocoanuts. The subsiding wave showed them on the ground, some lying

motionless, others squirming and writhing. They reminded him strangely of

ants. He was not shocked. He had risen above horror. Quite as a matter of

course he noted the succeeding wave sweep the sand clean of the human

wreckage. A third wave, more colossal than any he had yet seen, hurled the

church into the lagoon, where it floated off into the obscurity to leeward,

half-submerged, reminding him for all the world of a Noah’s ark.

He looked for Captain Lynch’s house, and was surprised to find it gone. Things

certainly were happening quickly. He noticed that many of the people in the

trees that still held had descended to the ground. The wind had yet again

increased. His own tree showed that. It no longer swayed or bent over and

back. Instead, it remained practically stationary, curved in a rigid angle

from the wind and merely vibrating. But the vibration was sickening. It was

like that of a tuning-fork or the tongue of a jew’s-harp. It was the rapidity

of the vibration that made it so bad. Even though its roots held, it could not

stand the strain for long. Something would have to break.

Ah, there was one that had gone. He had not seen it go, but there it stood,

the remnant, broken off half-way up the trunk. One did not know what happened

unless he saw it. The mere crashing of trees and wails of human despair

occupied no place in that mighty volume of sound. He chanced to be looking in

Captain Lynch’s direction when it happened. He saw the trunk of the tree,

half-way up, splinter and part without noise. The head of the tree, with three

sailors of the Aorai and the old captain sailed off over the lagoon. It did

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12

not fall to the ground, but drove through the air like a piece of chaff. For a

hundred yards he followed its flight, when it struck the water. He strained

his eyes, and was sure that he saw Captain Lynch wave farewell.

Raoul did not wait for anything more. He touched the native and made signs to

descend to the ground. The man was willing, but his women were paralayzed from

terror, and he elected to remain with them. Raoul passed his rope around the

tree and slid down. A rush of salt water went over his head. He held his

breath and clung desperately to the rope. The water subsided, and in the

shelter of the trunk he breathed once more. He fastened the rope more

securely, and then was put under by another sea. One of the women slid down

and joined him, the native remaining by the other woman, the two children, and

the cat.

The supercargo had noticed how the groups clinging at the bases of the other

trees continually diminished. Now he saw the process work out alongside him.

It required all his strength to hold on, and the woman who had joined him was

growing weaker. Each time he emerged from a sea he was surprised to find

himself still there, and next, surprised to find the woman still there. At

last he emerged to find himself alone. He looked up. The top of the tree had

gone as well. At half its original height, a splintered end vibrated. He was

safe. The roots still held, while the tree had been shorn of its windage. He

began to climb up. He was so weak that he went slowly, and sea after sea

caught him before he was above them. Then he tied himself to the trunk and

stiffened his soul to face the night and he knew not what.

He felt very lonely in the darkness. At times it seemed to him that it was the

end of the world and that he was the last one left alive. Still the wind

increased. Hour after hour it increased. By what he calculated was eleven

o’clock, the wind had become unbelievable. It was a horrible, monstrous thing,

a screaming fury, a wall that smote and passed on but that continued to smite

and pass on–a wall without end. It seemed to him that he had become light and

ethereal; that it was he that was in motion; that he was being driven with

inconceivable velocity through unending solidness. The wind was no longer air

in motion. It had become substantial as water or quicksilver. He had a

feeling that he could reach into it and tear it out in chunks as one might do

with the meat in the carcass of a steer; that he could seize hold of the wind

and hang on to it as a man might hang on to the face of a cliff.

The wind strangled him. He could not face it and breathe, for it rushed in

through his mouth and nostrils, distending his lungs like bladders. At such

moments it seemed to him that his body was being packed and swollen with solid

earth. Only by pressing his lips to the trunk of the tree could he breathe.

Also, the ceaseless impact of the wind exhausted him. Body and brain became

wearied. He no longer observed, no longer thought, and was but semiconscious.

One idea constituted his consciousness: SO THIS WAS A HURRICANE. That one idea

persisted irregularly. It was like a feeble flame that flickered occasionally.

From a state of stupor he would return to it–SO THIS WAS A HURRICANE. Then

he would go off into another stupor.

The height of the hurricane endured from eleven at night till three in the

morning, and it was at eleven that the tree in which clung Mapuhi and his

women snapped off. Mapuhi rose to the surface of the lagoon, still clutching

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13

his daughter Ngakura. Only a South Sea islander could have lived in such a

driving smother. The pandanus tree, to which he attached himself, turned over

and over in the froth and churn; and it was only by holding on at times and

waiting, and at other times shifting his grips rapidly, that he was able to

get his head and Ngakura’s to the surface at intervals sufficiently near

together to keep the breath in them. But the air was mostly water, what with

flying spray and sheeted rain that poured along at right angles to the

perpendicular.

It was ten miles across the lagoon to the farther ring of sand. Here, tossing

tree trunks, timbers, wrecks of cutters, and wreckage of houses, killed nine

out of ten of the miserable beings who survived the passage of the lagoon.

Half-drowned, exhausted, they were hurled into this mad mortar of the elements