They saw no one and seemed to be travelling through an empty land. The track dipped and rose but climbed higher all the tune, and Julie, when she looked back, saw huts in the distance, but no smoke arose from these small settlements nor was there any sign of life. Where the tracks came out of the cane-fields they came upon more huts, and as soon as he saw them Rawsthorne held up his hand. "We must be careful," he whispered. "Better safe than sorry. Wait here."
Mrs. Warmington sat down on the spot and clutched her feet. "These shoes are crippling me," she said.
"Hush!" said Julie, looking at the huts through me cane. "There may be soldiers here -- deserters."
Mrs. Warmington said no more, and Julie thought in astonishment: she is capable of being taught, after all. Then Rawsthorne came back. "It's all right," he said. "There isn't a soul here."
They emerged from the cane and moved among the huts, looking about. Mrs. Warmington stared at the crude rammed earth walls and the straw roofs and sniffed. "Pig-sties, that's all these are," she announced. "They're not even fit to keep pigs in."
Rawsthorne said, "I wonder if there's any water here. I could do with some."
"Let's look," said Julie, and went into one of the huts. It was sparsely furnished and very primitive, but also very clean. She went into a small cubicle-like room which had obviously been a pantry, to find it like Mother Hubbard's cupboard -- swept bare. Going into another hut, she found it the same and when she came out in the central clearing she found that Rawsthorne had had no luck either.
"These people have run away," he said. "They've either taken all their valuables with them or buried them." He held up a bottle. "I found some rum, but I wouldn't recommend it as a thirst-quencher. Still, it may come in useful."
"Do you think they've run away from the war?" asked Julie. "Or the hurricane -- like that old man near St. Michel?"
Rawsthorne rubbed his cheek and it made a scratchy sound. "That would be difficult to say. Off-hand, I'd say because of the war -- it doesn't really matter.'
"These people must have got their water from somewhere," said Julie. "What about from down there?'' She indicated a path that ran away downhill along the edge of the cane-field. "Shall we see?"
Rawsthorne hesitated. "I don't think we should hang about here -- it's too dangerous. I think we should push on."
From the moment they entered the scrub the going was harder. The ground was poor and stony and the tormented trees clung to the hillside in a frozen frenzy of exposed roots over which they stumbled and fell continually. The hillside was steeper here and what little soil there had been had long since been washed to the bottom lands where the fertile plantations were. Underfoot was rock and dust and a s parse sprinkling of tough grass clinging in stubborn clumps wherever the stunted trees did not cut off the sun.
They came to the top of a ridge to find themselves confronted by yet another which was even higher and steeper. Julie looked down into the little depression. "I wonder if there's a stream down there."
They found a watercourse in the valley but it was dry with not a drop of moisture in it, so they pushed on again. Mrs. Warmington was now becoming very exhausted; she had long since lost her ebullience and her propensity for giving instructions had degenerated into an aptitude for grumbling. Julie prodded her relentlessly and without mercy, never allowing herself to forget the things this woman had done, and Rawsthorne ignored her complaints -- he had enough to do in dragging his own ageing body up this terrible dusty hill.
When they got to the top they found the ground levelling into a plateau and it became less difficult. There was a thin covering of dubious soil and the vegetation was a little lusher.
They found another small gathering of huts in a clearing cut out of the scrub -- this was deserted too, and again they found no water. Rawsthorne looked about at the small patch of maize and cane, and said, "I suppose they rely on rainfall. Well, they're going to get a lot of it presently -- look back there."
The southern sky was dark with cloud and the sun was veiled in a thicker grey. It was perceptibly cooler and the breeze had increased to a definite wind. In the distance, seemingly very far away, they could still hear the thudding of the guns, and to Julie it seemed very much less impressive, although whether this was the effect of distance or whether there was less firing she had no way of knowing.
Rawsthorne was perturbed by the oncoming weather. "We can't stop now. All we have to do is to get over that." He pointed to an even higher ridge straight ahead. "On the other side of that is the Negrito."
"Oh, God!" said Mrs. Warmington. "I can't do it -- I just can't do it."
"You must," said Rawsthorne. "We have to get on a northern slope, and it's on the other side. Come on."
Julie prodded Mrs. Warmington to her feet and they left the huts. She looked at her watch -- it was four-thirty in the afternoon.
By five-thirty they had crossed the plateau and were halfway up the ridge, and the wind had strengthened to a gale. It seemed to be darkening much earlier than usual -- the clouds were now thick overhead but no rain had fallen as yet. The wind plucked at them as they scrambled up, buffeting them mercilessly, and more than once one or other of them lost his footing and slid down in a miniature landslide of dust and small stones. The wind whipped the branches of the stunted trees, transforming them into dangerous flails, and the dry leaves were swept away along the ridge on the wings of the gale.
It seemed an eternity before they got to the top, and even then they could not see down into the Negrito. "We must . .. get down . . . other side," shouted Rawsthorne against the wind. "We mustn't . . . stay . . ." He choked as the wind caught him in the mouth, and staggered forward in a crouch.
Julie followed, kicking Mrs. Warmington before her, and they stumbled across the top of the hill, exposed to the raging violence of the growing hurricane. There was a thick, clabbery yellow light about them which seemed almost tangible, and the dust swirled up from the barren earth in streaming clouds. Julie could taste it as she ran, and felt the grittiness between her teeth.
At last they began to descend and could see the floor of the Negrito Valley a thousand feet below dimly illuminated in that unwholesome light. As soon as they dropped below the crest of the hill there was some relief from the wind and Rawsthorne stopped, looking down in amazement. "What the devil's happening down there?"
At first Julie could not see what he meant, but then she saw that the lower slopes were alive with movement and that thin columns of people were moving up from the valley. "All those people," she said in wonder. "Where did they come from?"
Rawsthorne gave an abrupt laugh. "There's only one place they could have come from -- St. Pierre. Someone must have got them out." He frowned. "But the battle is still going on -- I think. Can you hear the guns?"
"No," said Julie. "But we wouldn't -- not in this wind."
"I wonder . . ." mused Rawsthorne. "I wonder if . . ." He did not finish his sentence but Julie caught the implication and her heart lifted. All the people down there must have left St. Pierre long before there was any indication that there was going to be a hurricane, and as far as she knew, there was only one man who believed the hurricane was on its way -- an undeviating, obstinate, stubborn, thick-headed man -- David Wyatt. He's alive, she thought, and found an unaccountable lump in her throat. Thank God, he's alive!
"I don't think we'd better go right down," said Rawsthorne. "Isn't that a ravine over there?''
There was a cleft in the hillside, an erosion scored deep by weather and water which would give shelter from the wind on three sides. They crossed the hillside diagonally and clambered down the steep sides of the ravine. Here the blast of wind was even less although they could hear it howl above their heads on the open hill, and they found a little hollow carved beneath a large rock, almost a cave, in which they could sit.
It was here that Rawsthorne finally collapsed. He had only been held together by his will to get the women to safety, and now, having done what he had set out to do,
his body rebelled against the punishment it had been forced to take. Julie looked at his grey face and slack lips in alarm. "Are you all right, Mr. Rawsthorne?"
"I'll be all right, my child." He managed a pallid smile and moved his hand weakly. "In my pocket . . . bottle . . . rum. Think we all ... deserve . . . drink."
She found the rum, uncocked the bottle and held it to his lips. The raw spirit seemed to do him good for some colour came back to his cheeks, or so she thought, for it was difficult to see in the fading light. She turned to Mrs. Warmington, who was equally prostrated, and forced some of the rum through her clenched teeth.
She was about to have some herself when there was an ear-splitting crash and a dazzle of vivid blue light, followed by the steady rolling of thunder. She rubbed her eyes and then heard the rain, the heavy drops smacking the dusty ground. Wriggling out of the little shelter she let it pour on her face and opened her mouth to let the drops fall in. Thirstily she soaked up the rain, through her mouth and through her skin, and felt her shirt sticking wetly to her body. The water did her more good than the rum would ever do.
in The wind roared across St. Pierre, fanning the flames of the burning buildings so that the fires jumped broad streets and it seemed as though the whole city would be engulfed in an unquenchable furnace.
Then the rain came and quenched it in fifteen minutes.
It rained over two inches in the first hour, a bitter, painful downpour, the heavy drops driven by the wind and bursting like shrapnel where they hit. Causton had never been hurt by rain before: he had never thought that a water drop could be so big, nor that it could hit with such paralysing force. At first he mistook it for hail, but then he saw the splashes exploding on the ground before the foxhole, and each drop seemed to be as much as would fill a cup. He blinked and shook the hair from his eyes, and then a drop hit him on the side of the face with frightening force and he ducked to the bottom of the hole.
Dawson moaned in pain and turned over on his side, holding his bandaged hands under his body to shield them. No one heard his sudden cry, not even Causton who crouched next to him, because the noise of the wind had risen to a savage howl drowning all other sounds.
Wyatt listened to the wind with professional and knowledgeable interest. He estimated that the wind-speed had suddenly risen to force twelve, the highest level on the Beaufort Scale. Old Admiral Beaufort had designed the scale for the use of sailing-ship captains and had been sensible about it -- his force twelve was the wind-speed at which, in his opinion, no reasonable seaman would be found at sea if he could help it. Force twelve is sixty-five knots or seventy-four miles an hour, and the Admiral was not concerned about wind-speeds greater than that because to a sailing captain caught in extremis it would not matter either. There are no degrees in sudden death But times have changed since Admiral Beaufort and Wyatt, who had helped to change them, knew it very well. His concern here was not for the action of the wind on a sailing ship but on an island, on the buildings of the towns. A force twelve wind exerts a pressure of seventeen pounds on each square foot, over three tons on the sides of an average house. A reasonably well-built house could withstand that pressure, but this hurricane was not going to be reasonable.
The highest estimated wind-speed in Mabel's gusts had been 170 miles an hour, producing pressures of well over a hundred pounds a square foot. Enough to pick a man off his feet and hurl him through the air as far as the wind cared to take him. Enough to lean on the side of a house and cave it in. Enough to uproot a strong tree, to rip the surface soil from a field, to destroy a plantation, to level a shanty town to the raw earth from which it had sprung.
Wyatt, therefore, listened to the raging of the wind with unusual interest.
Meanwhile, he held his head down and sat with Causton and Dawson in a hole full of water. The two drains spouted like fire hoses at full pressure, yet the hole never emptied. It was like sitting in the middle of a river. All around them streams of water gushed down the slope of the ridge, inches deep, carving courses in the soft earth. Wyatt knew that would not last long -- as the wind-speed increased it would become strong enough to lift up that surface water and make it airborne again in a driving mist of fine spray. That was one thing -- no one he had heard of had died of thirst in a hurricane.
This rain, falling in millions of tons, was the engine which drove the monster. On every square mile over which the hurricane passed it would drop, on average, half a million tons of water, thus releasing vast quantities of heat to power the circular winds. It was a great turbine -- three hundred miles in diameter and with almost unimaginable power.
Causton's thoughts were very different. For the first time in his life he was really frightened. In his work he covered the activities of men, and man, the political animal, he thought he understood. His beat was the world and he found himself in trouble-spots where students rioted in the streets of big cities and where bush wars flared in the green jungles. Other men covered the earthquakes, the tidal waves, the avalanches -- the natural disasters.
He had always known that if he got into trouble he could somehow talk his way out of it because he was dealing with men and men could be reasoned with. Now, for the first time in his life, he found himself in trouble where talking was futile. One could no more reason with a hurricane than with a Bengal tiger; in fact, it was worse -- one could at least shoot the tiger.
He had listened with vague interest to Wyatt's lecture on hurricanes back at Cap Sarrat Base, but he had been more curious about Wyatt than about the subject under discussion. Now he wished he had listened more closely and taken a keener interest. He nudged Wyatt, and shouted, "How long will this go on ?"
The dark shape of Wyatt turned towards him and he felt warm breath in his ear. "What did you say?"
He put his mouth next to Wyatt's ear, and bellowed, "How long will this go on?"
Wyatt turned again. "About eight hours -- then we'll have a short rest."
"Then what happens?"
"Another ten hours, but coming from the opposite direction."
Causton was shocked at the length of time he would have to undergo this ordeal. He had been thinking in terms of three or four hours only. He shouted, "Will it get worse?"
It was difficult to detect any emotion in Wyatt's answering shout, but he thought he heard a cold humour. "It hasn't really started yet."
Causton crouched deeper in the hole with the rain flailing his head and thought in despair, how can it get worse?
The sun had set and it was pitchy black, the impenetrable darkness broken only by the lightning flashes which were becoming more frequent. Any thunder there might have been was lost in the general uproar of the gale, which, to Wyatt's ear, was taking on a sharper edge -- the wind-speed was still increasing, although it was impossible to tell without instruments any reasonably exact speed. One thing was certain, though -- it was pushed well over the further edge of the Beaufort Scale.
Wyatt thought with grim amusement of Causton's question: will it get worse? The man had no conception of the forces of nature. One could explode an atomic bomb in the middle of this hurricane and the puny added energy would be lost -- • swallowed up in the greater cataclysm. And this was not too bad. True, Mabel was a bad bitch, but there had been worse -- and there had been far greater wind-speeds recorded.
He closed his mind to the howling of the wind. Now what was it -- oh, yes -- two hundred and thirty-one miles an hour recorded at Mount Washington before the instrument smashed -- that was the record reading. And then there were the theoretical speeds of the tornadoes. No chance of recording those, of course -- the very fast winds in excess of six hundred miles an hour -- but it took a fast wind to drive a straw through an inch-thick plank of wood.
And yet tornadoes were small. Comparing a tornado with a hurricane was like comparing a fighter plane with a bomber -- the fighter is faster, but the bomber has more total power. And a hurricane has immeasurably more power than any tornado, more power than any other wind system on earth. He
remembered the really bad one that crossed the Atlantic when he had been a student in England back in 1953. It had been the very devil in the west Atlantic, but then it had crossed and passed to the north of England, choking up the waters of the North Sea very much as Mabel was doing down there in Santego Bay. The dykes of Holland had been overwhelmed and the waters had surged over East Anglia, bringing the worst weather disaster Europe had known for hundreds of years. The hurricane was the devil among winds.
Dawson held his hands to his chest. He was soaked to the skin and felt that he would never be dry again. Had he not liked game fishing, he thought that he would have spent the rest of his life in some nice desert which never knew a wind like this -- say, Death Valley. But he did like fishing and these were the waters for it and he knew- that if he survived this experience he would come back. On the other hand -- why go away at all? Why not settle in San Fernandez? There was nothing to keep him in New York now and he might as well live where he liked.
He grinned tightly as he thought that even in this he would be continuing the programme mapped out for him by his press agent, Wiseman, who had plotted mightily to cut Hemingway's mantle to fit Dawson's different figure. Hadn't Hemingway lived in Cuba? To hell with that! It was what he wanted to do and he would do it.
Curiously enough, he was not frightened. The unexpected courage he had found in facing up to Roseau and his thugs followed by the catharsis of his confession to Wyatt had released something within him, some fount of manhood that had been blocked and diverted to corrupt ends. He should have been frightened because this was the most frightening thing that had ever happened to him, but he was not and the knowledge filled him with strength.
Smeared with viscous mud, he lay in a water-filled hole with the wind and the rain lashing him cruelly and was very content.
The hurricane achieved its greatest strength just after midnight. The very noise itself was a fearsome thing, a malignant terrifying howl of raw power that seared the mind. The rain had slackened and there were no large drops, just an atomized mist driving level with the ground at over a hundred miles an hour, and, as Wyatt had predicted, the flooding ground water had been lifted in the wind's rage.
Bagley, Desmond - Wyatts Hurricane Page 23