Far around the great circle, a third of the world away, this storm had taken shape. It was a part—and not a small part—of a vast and complex system of atmospheric forces covering the hemisphere. No longer was it a young storm racing its thousand miles a day. Now, powerful and sedate in maturity, it moved with the steady, sure pace of majesty. Along a line of hundreds of miles, its rain belt pressed upon the coast. What need to announce such a coming by showy fireworks? Only, along the beaches, the vast unhurried pounding of the groundswell made known that far off some great force moved upon the waters.

•

The clouds were lower still; mist veiled the tips of the headlands; and there was rain. No tropical downpour, no sudden burst of heavy drops. First, so fine was the rain, it was as if the low-lying mist had merely swooped a little lower. Then for a moment it was gone. But it came again. A wind gust took the falling drops and swirled them out like a wisp of fog. Minute by minute, unhurrying, the rain grew thicker and more steady.

Along all that straight mountainous coast, five hundred miles from Mendocino to Conception, there was rain. Rain on the rocks and the headlands, rain on the beaches and lagoons, rain on the high grass-slopes. Rain sweeping inland, stippling the surface of the shrunken rivers, swirling mistily up the canyons among the redwood trees, cresting the ridges.

Broken into mile-deep turbulent eddies, impeded a little, nevertheless across the mountains as across the ocean the rain-bearing air moved irresistibly ahead, controlled by cosmic forces far too powerful to be blocked even by the high ridges of the western shore.

Driving in parallel with the coast, the rain had struck along five hundred miles almost at the same moment. But now the rain-belt lost all its simplicity. The ridges and canyons here of themselves impeded and there aided, and still elsewhere caused great waves within the air. Here, around some rocky shoulder the wind howled at gale-force; a mile away in a sheltered corner the leaves hung limp on the bay-trees. On the windward slopes of steep ridges the rain was a thick torrent, but in long leeward valleys where the air-currents swooped downward, it slacked off to a drizzle. Following open valleys, long arms of rain ran miles ahead, and once two of these curved together and, meeting, momentarily surrounded by rain a narrow island of dryness.

So, on a scale small enough for men to see, a wave rushes into a rocky cove. Here it pours through the gaps, there it beats against a larger stone, elsewhere it rushes ahead and then turns for a moment back upon itself. Yet always the wave rises and pushes on, until suddenly the whole cove lies beneath the weltering surface of the water, and the rocks are covered and impotent. Thus too the rain-belt drove onward, overwhelming the hills.