CHAPTER XII.
ON THE HORIZON.
At that date the tempest took its most terrible form, that of the hurricane.

The wind had set in from the southwest.

The air moved with a velocity of ninety miles an hour.

It was indeed a hurricane, in fact, one of those terrible windstorms which wrecks all the ships of a roadstead, and which, even on land, the most solid structures cannot resist.

Such was the one which, on the 25th of July, 1825, devastated Guadaloupe.