THE TREE-TOP HUNTER
still there was no sound save the deep and awesome moaning of the wind.
Then, suddenly, the jungle giants whipped back, lashing their mighty tops in angry and deafening protest. A vivid and blinding light flashed from the whirling, inky clouds above. The deep canonade of roaring thunder belched forth its fearsome challenge. The deluge came—all hell broke loose upon the jungle.
The tribe huddled, shivering from the cold rain, at the bases of great trees. The lightning darting and flashing through the blackness, showed wildly waving branches, whipping streamers and bending trunks.
Now and again some ancient patriarch of the woods, rent by a flashing bolt, would crash in a thousand pieces among the surrounding trees, carrying down numberless branches and many smaller neighbors to add to the tangled confusion of the tropical jungle.
Branches, great and small, torn away by the ferocity of the tornado, hurtled through the wildly waving verdure, carrying death and destruction to countless unhappy denizens of the thickly peopled world below.
For hours the fury of the storm continued without surcease, and still the tribe huddled close in shivering fear. In constant danger from falling trunks and branches and paralyzed by the vivid flashing of lightning and the bellowing of thunder
[99]
