Dolphin Island

Until now, the night had been calm and still, the only sound the murmur of the waves, lazily rolling against the reef. But in the last hour a wind had come up, blowing in fitful gusts, and the voice of the sea had acquired an angrier, more determined note.

Johnny saw the thing first, as he was climbing out of the pool. Beyond the reef, at a distance that was quite impossible to judge, a faint light was moving slowly across the waters. For a moment he wondered if it could be a ship; then he realized that it was too blurred and formless, like a luminous fog.

“Mick,” he whispered urgently, “what’s that, out there at sea?”

Mick’s answer was not reassuring. He gave a low whistle of astonishment and moved closer to Johnny, as if for protection.

Almost unable to believe their eyes, they watched as the mist gathered itself together, became brighter and more sharp-edged, and climbed higher and higher in the sky. Within a few minutes, it was no longer a faint glow in the darkness: it was a pillar of fire walking upon the face of the sea.

It filled them both with superstitious awe—with the fear of the unknown, which men will never lose, because the wonders of the universe are without end. Their minds were full of wild explanations, fantastic theories—and then Mick gave a relieved, though rather shaken, laugh.

“I know what that is,” he said. “It’s only a water-spout I’ve seen them before, but never at night.”

Like many mysteries, the explanation was simple—once you knew it. But the wonder remained, and the boys stared in fascination at the spinning column of water as it sucked up billions of the sea’s luminous creatures and scattered them into the sky. It must have been many miles away, for Johnny could not hear the roar of its passage over the waves; and presently it vanished in the direction of the mainland.

When the boys had recovered from their astonishment, the incoming tide had risen to their knees.

“If we don’t get a move on, We’ll have to swim for it,” said Mick. Then he added thoughtfully, as he splashed off toward the island, “I don’t like the look of that thing. It’s a sign of bad weather—bet you ten to one we’re in for a big blow.”

How true that was they began to realize by next morning. Even if one knew nothing about meteorology, the picture on the television screen was terrifying. A great whirlpool of cloud, a thousand miles across, covered all the western Pacific. As seen from the weather satellite’s cameras, looking down upon it from far out in space, it appeared to be quite motionless. But that was only because of its size. If one watched carefully, one could see after a few minutes that the spiral bands of cloud were sweeping swiftly across the face of the globe. The winds that drove them were moving at speeds up to a hundred and fifty miles an hour, for this was the greatest hurricane to strike the Queensland coast in a generation.

On Dolphin Island, no one wandered very far from a television screen. Every hour, revised forecasts came through from the computers that were predicting the progress of the storm, but there was little change during the day. Meteorology was now an exact science; the weathermen could state with confidence what was going to happen —though they could not, as yet, do much about it.

The island had known many other storms, and the prevailing mood was excitement and alertness, rather than alarm. Luckily, the tide would be out when the hurricane reached its peak, so there was no danger of waves sweeping over the island—as had happened elsewhere in the Pacific. All through the day, Johnny was helping with the safety precautions. Nothing movable could be left in the open; windows had to be boarded over and boats drawn up as far as possible on the beach. The Flying Fish was secured to four heavy anchors, and to make doubly certain that she did not move, ropes were taken from her and secured to a group, of pandanus trees on the island. Most of the fishermen, however, were not much worried about their boats, for the harbor was on the sheltered side of the island. The forest would break the full force of the gale.

The day was hot and oppressive, without a breath of wind. It scarcely needed the picture on the television screen and the steady flow of weather reports from the east, to know that Nature was planning one of her big productions. Moreover, though the sky was clear and cloudless, the storm had sent its messages ahead of it. All day long, tremendous waves had been battering against the outer reef, until the whole island shook beneath their impact.

When darkness fell, the sky was still clear and the stars seemed abnormally brilliant. Johnny was standing outside the Naurus’ concrete-and-alurninium bungalow, taking a last look at the sky before turning in, when he became aware of a new sound above the thunder of the waves. It was a sound such as he had never heard before, as of a monstrous animal moaning in pain, and even on that hot, sultry evening, it seemed to chill his blood.