The Great Taboo

Next morning the day broke bright and calm, as if the tempest had been but an evil dream of the night, now past forever. The birds sang loud; the lizards came forth from their holes in the wall, and basked, green and gold, in the warm, dry sunshine. But though the sky overhead was blue and the air clear, as usually happen after these alarming tropical cyclones and rainstorms, the memorials of the great wind that had raged all night long among the forests of the island were neither few nor far between. Everywhere the ground was strewn with leaves and branches and huge stems of cocoa-palms. All nature was draggled. Many of the trees were stripped clean of their foliage, as completely as oaks in an English winter; on others, big strands of twisted fibres marked the scars and joints where mighty boughs had been torn away by main force; while, elsewhere, bare stumps alone remained to mark the former presence of some noble dracaena or some gigantic banyan.

Bread-fruits and cocoanuts lay tossed in the wildest confusion on the ground; the banana and plantain-patches were beaten level with the soil or buried deep in the mud; many of the huts had given way entirely; abundant wreckage strewed every corner of the island. It was an awful sight. Muriel shuddered to herself to see how much the two that night had passed through.