It was a sickly dawn, smeared with a dark haze that dimmed the stars. The heated air lay heavy and languorous against the earth, with no breeze to stir it, and my skin prickled. in the charged atmosphere.
Chubby was feeding twigs to the fire and blowing life into it, when I returned. He looked up at me and confirmed my diagnosis.
“Weather going to break.”
“What is coming, Chubby?” and he shrugged. “Glass is down to 28.2, but we’ll know by noon,” and he went back to huffing and puffing over the fire.
The weather had affected Sherry also. The hair at her temples was damp with perspiration and she snapped at me peevishly as I changed her dressings, but minuta later she came up behind me as I dressed, and laid her cheek against my naked back.
“Sorry, Harry, it’s just so sticky and close this morning,” and she ran her lips across my back, touching the thick raised cicatrice of the bullet scar with her tongue.
“Forgive?” she asked.
Chubby and I dived into the pool at eleven oclock that morning.
We had been down thirty-eight minutes without making any further significant discovery when I heard the tinny clink! clink! clink! - transmitted through the water. I paused and listened, noticing that Chubby had stopped also. It came again, thrice repeated.
On the surface, Angelo had immersed half of a threes foot length of iron rail into the water and was beating out the recall signal upon it with a hammer from the tool kit.
I gave Chubby the openhanded “wash out” sign and we began the ascent at once.
As we climbed into the boat I asked impatiently, “What is it, Angelo?” and in reply he pointed out to seaward over the jagged and irregular back of the reef. I pulled off my mask and blinked my eyes, refocusing after the limited horizons of the marine world.
It lay low and black against the sea, a thin dark smear as though some playful god had drawn a charcoal line across the horizon - but even as I watched, it seemed to grow spreading wider into the paler blue of the sky, darker and still darker it rose out of the sea. Chubby whistled softly and shook his head.
“Here comes Lady C. and, man, she is in a big hurry.”
The speed of that low dark front was uncanny. It lifted up, drawing a funereal curtain across the sky and as Chubby gunned the motors and ran for the channel the first racing streamers of cloud spread across the sun.
Sherry came to sit beside me on the thwart and help me strip the clinging wet rubber suit.
“What is it, Harry?“she asked.
“Lady C,” I told her. “It’s the cyclone, the same one that killed the Dawn Light. She’s out hunting again,” and Angelo fetched the lifebelts from the forepeak and handed one to each of us. We tied them on and sat close together and watched it come on in awesome grandeur, overwhelming the sun, changing the sky from a high pure blue dome into a low grey roof of filthy scudding cloud.
We were running hard before her, leaving the channel and flying across the inner waters to the shelter of the cove. All our faces were turned to watch it, all our hearts quailed at the sense of our own frailty before such force and power.
The cloud front passed over our heads as we ran into the bay, and immediately we were plunged into a twilight world, fraught with the fury to come. The cloud dragged a skirt of cold damp air beneath it. It passed over us, and we shivered in the sudden drop in temperature. With a shriek, the wind was upon us, turning the air into a mixture of sand and driven spray.
The motors,” Chubby bellowed at me, as the whaleboat touched the beach. Those two new Evinrudes represented half the savings of a lifetime and I understood his concern. “We’ll take them with us.”
“And the boat?” Chubby persisted.
“Sink it. There’s a firm bottom of sand for it to lie on.”
As Chubby and I freed the motors, Angelo and Sherry lashed the folds of the tarpaulin over the open deck to secure the equipment, and then used the nylon diving lines to tie down the irreplaceable scuba sets and the waterproof cases that contained my medical kit and tools. Then, while Chubby and I hefted the two heavy Evinrudes, Angelo allowed the wind to push the whaleboat out into the bay where he pulled the drainplugs and she filled immediately with water. The steep wind-maddened sea poured in over the side, and she went down swiftly in twenty feet of water.
Angelo returned to the beach using a dogged side-stroke with the waves breaking over his head. By this time, Sherry and I had almost reached the line of palm trees.
Doubled under my load, I glanced back. Chubby was lumbering after us. He was similarly burdened by the second motor, doubled also under the dead weight of metal and wading through the waist-high torrent of blown white sand. Angelo emerged from the water and followed him.
They were close behind us as we ran into the trees. If I had hoped to find shelter here, then I was a fool, for we found ourselves transferred from an exposed position of acute discomfort into one of real and deadly danger.
The great winds of the cyclone had thrashed the palms into a lunatic frenzy. The sound of it was a deafening clattering roar that was stunning in its intensity. The long graceful stems of the palms whipped about wildly, and the wind clawed loose the fronds and sent them flying off into the haze of sand and spray like huge misshapen birds.
We ran in single file along one of the ill-defined footpaths, Sherry leading us, covering her head with both hands, while I was for the first time grateful for the scanty cover given me by the big white motor on my shoulder for all of us were exposed to the double threat of danger.
The whipping of the tall palms flung from the fiftyfoot-high heads their cluster of iron-hard nuts. Big as a cannonball and almost as dangerous, these projectiles bombarded us as we ran. One of them struck the motor I carried, a blow that made me stagger, another fell beside the path and on the second bounce hit Sherry on the lower leg. Even though most of its power was spent, still it knocked her down and rolled her in the sand like a running springbok hit by a high-powered rifle. When, she regained her feet she was limping heavily - but she ran on through the lethal hail of coconuts.
We had almost reached the saddle of the hills when the wind increased the power of its assault. I heard its shrieking overhead on a higher angrier note, and coming in across the tree-tops roaring like a wild beast.
It hurled a new curtain of sand at us, and as I glanced ahead I saw the first palm tree begin to go.
I saw it lean out wearily, exhausted by its efforts to resist the wind, the earth around its base heaved upwards as the root system was torn from the sandy soil. As it came down so it gathered speed; swinging in a terrible arc, like the axe of the headsman, it fell towards us. Sherry was fifteen paces ahead of me, just beginning the ascent of the saddle and she had her face turned downwards, watching her own feet, her hands still held to her head.
She was running into the path of the falling tree, and she seemed so small and fragile beneath that solid hole of descending timber. It would crush her with a single gargantuan blow.
I screamed at her, but although she was so close she could not hear me. The roaring of the wind seemed to swamp all our senses. Down swung the long limber stem of the palm tree, and Sherry ran on INto its path. I dropped the motor, shrugging it from my shoulder and I ran forward. Even then I saw I could not reach her in time, and I dived belly down, reaching out to the full stretch of my right arm and I hit Sherry’s back foot, slapping it across the other as she swung it forward. The ankle tap of the football field, and it tripped her. She fell flat on her face in the sand. As the two of us lay outstretched the palm tree descended. The fury of its stroke rushed through the air even above the sound of the wind and it struck with a blow that was transmitted through the earth into my body, jarring me and rattling the teeth in my skull.
Instantly I was up and dragging Sherry to her feet. The palm tree had missed her by eighteen inches and she was stunned and terrified. I hugged her for a few moments, trying to give her comfort and strength. Then I lifted her over the palm stem that blocked the path, pointed her at the saddle and gave her a shove.
“Run!” I shouted and she staggered onwards. Angelo helped me lift the motor on to my shoulder once more. We clambered over the tree and toiled on up the slope after Sherry’s running figure.
All around us in the palm groves I could hear the thud and crash of other trees falling and I tried to run with MY face upturned to catch the next threat before it developed, but another flying coconut hit me a glancing blow on the temple, dimming my vision for a moment and I staggered on blindly, taking my chances amongst the monstrous
