The weather was calm to the point of deadness. Mont Pelée, that smouldering volcano, that suppressed Titan, was asleep. Not a cloud in the sky, not a ripple in the bay. Jansen appeared to be having trouble, for an hour passed, and the missing crew had not returned.
Between you and me, as man and man, the delinquent mariners were in the lockup, but Mrs. Mink does not know that, as yet. You can't rivet a nail in a boiled potato, nor temperance in the tempestuous seaman, but Mrs. Mink doesn't know that, as yet.
We were just commenting upon a dark, small, condensed looking cloud which had appeared above the shoulder of Mont Pelée, questioning whether it was an exhalation of the volcano, Pelée in eruption. Was Mont Pelée about to overwhelm St. Pierre, a Vesuvius to Pompeii? Was I, like the elder Pliny, to perish, a suffocated naturalist, a philosopher in cinder?
But it grew with enormous rapidity. It seemed to have an uncommon knack of taking in nourishment, a terrifying appetite. I saw a house on the mountain side rise up and vanish, swallowed at a gulp. Professor Simpson got out his note-book and took notes. He described the cloud in his notebook as “bulbous, or bulging in form, in colour a bluish black, and unfolding centrifugally toward the edges.”
“In my opinion,” he said, “we are ourselves in some personal danger. I believe this is what is commonly called a tornado. Do you differ from me, Dr. Uls-water?”
I said: “Not there, professor, though it's late in the year for West-Indian hurricanes. The most pointed opinion I've got is that this deck is going to be a wet place in a minute.”
We'd hardly got to the cabin before the roar was audible, and grew till we could not hear ourselves. One minute more and the _Violetta_ gave a jerk that threw us on the floor, Norah on Professor Simpson and Mrs. Mink on Norah. Between them they obscured him, on the whole, very well. I got up and looked through the port-hole, and saw only spray and splashing water. The ship was engaged in a sort of circular high-kicking dance, something between a waltz and a cancan. The professor remained obscure. Neither Mrs. Mink nor Norah saw their way clearly to getting off him, and for myself,--seeing that he kicked but vaguely, harmlessly,--I thought Mrs. Mink and Norah might as well suit themselves about it.