Dolphin Island

And then he saw something to the east that broke his nerve completely. An unbroken wall of utter blackness was riding up the sky, climbing visibly even as he watched. He had heard and seen the onset of the hurricane, and he did not wait for more.

“I was just coming to get you,” said Mick, when Johnny closed the door thankfully behind him. Those were the last words that he heard for many hours. Seconds later, the whole house gave a shudder. Then came a noise which, despite its incredible violence, was startlingly familiar. For a moment it took Johnny back to the very beginning of his adventures; he remembered the thunder of the Santa Anna jets, only a few feet beneath him, as he climbed aboard the hovership, half a world away and a seeming lifetime ago.

The roar of the hurricane had already made speech impossible. Yet now, unbelievably, the sound level became even higher, for such a deluge as Johnny had never imagined was descending upon the house. The feeble word “rain” could not begin to describe it. Judging by the sound that was coming through roof and walls, a man in the open would be drowned by the sheer mass of descending water—if he was not crushed first.

Yet Mick’s family was taking all this quite calmly. The younger children were even gathered around the television set, watching the pictures, though they could not hear a word of the sound. Mrs. Nauru was placidly knitting—a rare accomplishment which she had learned in her youth and which normally fascinated Johnny because he had never seen anyone doing it before. But now he was too disturbed to watch the intricate movement of the needles and the magical transformation of wool into sock or sweater.

He tried to guess, from the uproar around him, what was happening outside. Surely, trees were being torn up by their roots; boats and eve’n houses scattered by the gale! But the howl of the wind and the deafening, unending crash of water masked all other sounds. Guns might be booming outside the door, and no one would ever hear them.

Johnny looked at Mick for reassurance; he wanted some sign that everything was all right, that it would soon be over and everything would be normal. But Mick shrugged his shoulders, then made a pantomime of putting on a face mask and breathing from an Aqualung mouthpiece, which Johnny did not think at all funny in the circumstances.

He wondered what was happening to the rest of the island, but somehow nothing seemed real except this one room and the people in it. It was as if they alone existed now, and the hurricane was launching its attack upon them personally. So might Noah and his family have waited for the flood to rise around them, the sole survivors of their world.

Johnny had never thought that a storm on land could frighten him; after all, it was “only” wind and rain. But the demonic fury raving around the frail fortress in which he was sheltering was something beyond all his experience and imagination. If he had been told that the whole island was about to be blown into the sea, he would have believed it

Suddenly, even above the roar of the storm, there came the sound of a mighty crash—though whether it was close at hand or far away it was impossible to tell. At the same instant, the lights went out.

That moment of utter darkness, at the height of the storm, was one of the most terrifying that Johnny had ever experienced. As long as he had been able to see his friends, even if he could not talk with them, he had felt reasonably safe. Now he was alone in the screaming night, helpless before natural forces that he had never known existed.

Luckily, the darkness lasted for only a few seconds. Mr. Nauru had been expecting the worst; he had an electric lantern ready, and when its light came on, showing everything quite unchanged, Johnny felt ashamed of his fright.

Even in a hurricane, life continues. Now that they had lost the television, the younger children started to play with their toys or read picture books. Mrs. Nauru continued placidly knitting, while her husband began to plow through a thick World Food Organization report on Australian fisheries, full of charts, statistics, and maps. When Mick set up a game of checkers, Johnny did not feel much like challenging him, but he realized that it was the sensible thing to do.

So the night dragged on. Sometimes the hurricane slackened for a moment, and the roar of the wind dropped to a level at which one could make oneself heard by shouting. But nobody made the effort, for there was nothing to say, and very quickly the noise returned to its former volume.

Around midnight, Mrs. Nauru got up, disappeared into the kitchen, and came back a few minutes later with a jug of hot coffee, half a dozen tin mugs, and an assorted collection of cakes. Johnny wondered if this was the last snack he would ever eat; nevertheless, he enjoyed it, and then went on losing games to Mick.