About the middle of March the windows of heaven opened, and it began a rain like that of the time of Noah.

It was tropical in quantity and persistency, and arctic in temperature.

For dreary hours that lengthened into weary days and nights, and these again into never-ending weeks, the driving, drenching flood poured down upon the sodden earth, searching the very marrow of the five thousand hapless men against whose chilled frames it beat with pitiless monotony, and soaked the sand bank upon which we lay until it was like a sponge filled with ice-water.

It seems to me now that it must have been two or three weeks that the sun was wholly hidden behind the dripping clouds, not shining out once in all that time.

The intervals when it did not rain were rare and short.