The Maid of Sker. Blackmore Richard Doddridge

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      It was time to leave off thinking, if one meant to do any good. The whirlwinds spun and whistled round us, now on this side, now on that; and the old house creaked and rattled as the weather pulled or pushed at it. The sand was drifted in the courtyard (without any special whirlwind) three feet deep in the north-east corner; and the sky, from all sides, fell upon us, like a mountain undermined.

      "Boy, go into your mother," I said; and I thank God for enabling me, else might she have been childless. "Tell your mother not to be frightened, but to get your father up, and to have the kettle boiling."

      "Oh, Dyo – dear Dyo! let me come with you, after that poor little child, and after my five brothers."

      "Go in, you helpless fool," I said; and he saw the set of my countenance, and left me, though but half-content.

      It needed all my strength to draw the door of the house behind me, although the wind was bent no more on one way than another, but universal uproar. And down-roar too; for it fell on my head quite as much as it jerked my legs, and took me aback, and took me in front, and spun me round, and laughed at me. Then of a sudden all wind dropped, and yellow sky was over me.

      What course to take (if I had the choice) in search of those poor children, was more at first than I could judge, or bring my mind to bear upon. For as sure as we live by the breath of the Lord, the blast of His anger deadens us.

      Perhaps it was my instinct only, having been so long afloat, which drove me, straight as affairs permitted, toward the margin of the sea. And perhaps I had some desire to know how the sea itself would look under this strange visiting. Moreover, it may have come across me, without any thinking twice of it, that Bunny had an inborn trick of always running toward the sea, as behoved a sailor's daughter.

      Anyhow, that way I took, so far as it was left to me to know the points of the compass, or the shape and manner of anything. For simple and short as the right road was, no simpleton or shortwitted man could have hit it, or come near it, in that ravenous weather. In the whirl and grim distortion of the air and the very earth, a man was walking (as you might say) in the depth of a perfect calm, with stifling heat upon him, and a piece of shadow to know himself by; and then, the next moment, there he was in a furious state of buffeting, baffled in front, and belaboured aback, and bellowed at under the swing of his arms, and the staggering failure of his poor legs.

      Nevertheless, in the lull and the slack times, I did my utmost to get on, having more presence of mind perhaps than any landsman could have owned. Poor fellows they are when it comes to blow; and what could they do in a whirlwind?

      As I began to think of them, and my luck in being a seaman, my courage improved to that degree that I was able quite heartily to commend myself to the power of God, whom, as a rule, I remember best when the world seems coming to an end. And I think it almost certain that this piety on my part enabled me to get on as I did.

      For without any skill at all or bravery of mine, but only the calmness which fell upon me, as it used to do in the heat of battle, when I thought on my Maker, all at once I saw a way to elude a great deal of the danger. This was as simple as could be, yet never would have come home to a man unable to keep his wits about him.

      Blurred and slurred as the whole sky was with twisted stuff and with yellowness, I saw that the whirling pillars of sand not only whirled but also travelled in one spiral only. They all came from the west, where lay the largest spread of sandhills, and they danced away to the north-east first, and then away to south of east, shaping a round like a ship with her helm up, preserving their spiral from left to right as all waterspouts do on the north of the Line.

      So when a column of sand came nigh to suck me up, or to bury me – although it went thirty miles an hour, and I with the utmost care of my life could not have managed ten perhaps – by porting my helm without carrying sail, and so working a traverse, I kept the weather-gage of it and that made all the difference.

      Of course I was stung in the face and neck as bad as a thousand musquitoes when the skirts of the whirl flapped round at me, but what was that to care about? It gave me pleasure to walk in such peril, and feel myself almost out of it by virtue of coolness and readiness. Nevertheless it gave me far greater pleasure, I can assure you, to feel hard ground beneath my feet, and stagger along the solid pebbles of the beach of Sker, where the sand-storm could not come so much.

      Hereupon I do believe that, in spite of all my courage – so stout and strong in the moment of trial – all my power fell away before the sense of safety. What could my old battered life matter to any one in the world, except myself and Bunny? However, I was so truly thankful to kind Providence for preserving it, that I cannot have given less than nine jumps, and said, "Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John," three times over, and in both ways.

      This brought me back to the world again, as any power of piety always does when I dwell therein, and it drove me thereupon to trust in Providence no longer than the time was needful for me to recover breathing.

      When I came to my breath and prudence, such a fright at first oppressed me, that I made a start for running into the foremost of the waves, thinking (if I thought at all) of lying down there, with my head kept up, and defying the sand to quench the sea.

      Soon, however, I perceived that this was not advisable. Such a roar arose around me from the blows of hills and rocks, and the fretful eagerness of the sea to be at war again, and the deep sound of the distance – the voice of man could travel less than that of a sandpiper, and the foot of man might long to be the foot of a sandhopper. For the sea was rising fast up the verge of ground-swell, and a deep hoarse echo rolling down the shoaling of the surges. This to me was pleasant music, such as makes a man awake.

      The colour of the sun and sky was just as I had once beholden near the pearl-grounds of Ceylon, where the bottom of the sea comes up with a very mournful noise, and the fish sing dirges, and no man, however clear of eye, can open the sea and the sky asunder. And by this time being able to look round a little – for the air was not so full of sand, though still very thick and dusty – I knew that we were on the brink of a kind of tornado, as they call it in the tropics, – a storm that very seldom comes into these northern latitudes, being raised by violence of heat, as I have heard a surveyor say, the air going upward rapidly, with a great hole left below it.

      Now as I stood on watch, as it were, and, being in such a situation, longed for more tobacco, what came to pass was exactly this – so far as a man can be exact when his wits have long been failing him.

      The heaven opened, or rather seemed to be cloven by a sword-sweep, and a solid mass of lightning fell, with a cone like a red-hot anvil. The ring of black rocks received its weight, and leaped like a boiling caldron, while the stormy waters rose into a hiss and heap of steam. Then the crash of heaven stunned me.

      When I came to myself it was raining as if it had never rained before. The rage of sand and air was beaten flat beneath the rain, and the fretful lifting of the sea was hushed off into bubbles. What to do I could not tell, in spite of all experience, but rubbed the sand from both my eyes, as bad as the beard of an oyster, and could see no clear way anywhere.

      Now the sky was spread and traversed with a net of crossing fires, in and out like mesh and needle, only without time to look. Some were yellow, some deep red, and some like banks of violet, and others of a pale sweet blue, like gazing through a window. They might have been very beautiful, and agreeable to consider, if they had been further off, and without that wicked crack of thunder through the roar. Worse storms I had seen, of course, in the hot world and up mountains, and perhaps thought little of them; but then there was this difference, I had always plenty of fellows with me, and it was not Sunday. Also, I then was young, and trained for cannons to be shot at me. Neither had I a boat of my own, but my dear wife was alive.

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