The menace was express and imminent.

Even as I gazed, the sun was blotted out.

At any moment the tempest might fall upon Aros in its might.
The suddenness of this change of weather so fixed my eyes on heaven that it was some seconds before they alighted on the bay, mapped out below my feet, and robbed a moment later of the sun.

The knoll which I had just surmounted overflanked a little amphitheatre of lower hillocks sloping towards the sea, and beyond that the yellow arc of beach and the whole extent of Sandag Bay.

It was a scene on which I had often looked down, but where I had never before beheld a human figure.