[Dark Saint Alaick]

He sat with his head on his hands until his thoughts were disturbed. A humid breath had risen sluggishly from the jungle floor. The sun was dull. Looking toward the horizon, he could see a black cloud. For an instant he was frightened, the transformation had been so gigantic and so soundless. He knew a sudden urgent impulse to go back to the valley. He disobeyed it and watched the coming of the storm. The first rapier of lightning through the bowels of the approaching cloud warned him again. Staunchly he stood. He had come there to think.
"I must go back--and begin this work," he told himself. "I have found a friend!" The cloud was descending. Thunder ruminated in heaven's garret. "It is folly," he repeated, "folly, folly, folly in the face of God." Now the sun went out like an extinguished lamp, and the horizon crept closer. A curtain of torrential rain was lowered in the north. "They will make the earth beautiful," he said, and ever and again: "This thing is not beautiful. It is wrong." His agitation increased rapidly. The cloud was closing on the mountain like a huge hand. The muscles in his legs quivered.
"If there were only a God," he whispered, "what a prayer I would make!" Then the wind came like a visible thing, pushing its fingers over the vegetation below, and whirling up the mountain, laden with dust. After the wind, the rain--heavy, roaring rain that fell, not in separate drops, but in thick streams. The lightning was incessant. It illuminated remote, white-topped peaks, which, in the fury of the storm, appeared to be swaying. It split clouds apart, and the hurricane healed the rents. All lights went out. The world was wrapped in darkness.