So heavy was that tropical fall of water that the horses were bothered
by the beating of the big drops, and shook their heads and stamped
fretfully under the ceaseless bombardment. Indeed, when one stretched
out his hand the drops stung him as if with lashes of tiny whips. There
was no wind, no thunder, no flash of lightning, only the tremendous
downpour which blended earth and sky in a drab, swift river.
The air was filled with parallel lines, as in some pencil drawings--not
like ordinary rain, but as if the sky had changed into a vast
watering-spout and was sending down a continuous flood from a myriad
holes. It was hard to look up through the terrific downpour, for it
blinded one and whipped the face and made one breathless, but now and
again a puff of the rare wind would lift the sodden brim of the sombrero
and then one caught a glimpse of the low-hanging clouds, with the
nearest whiffs of black mist dragging across the top of a hill. Without
noticeable currents of wind, that mass of clouds was shifting
slowly--with a sort of rolling motion, across the sky. And the weight of
the rain forced the two to bend their heads and stare down to where the
face of the earth was alive with the gliding, brown waters, whose
surface was threshed into a continual foam. To speak to each other
through the uproar, they had to cup their hands about their lips and
shout. Then again the rainfall around them fell away to a drizzling mist
and the beating of the downpour sounded far away, and they were
surrounded by distant walls of noise.
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