Grant just stuck out his tongue at me. He must not understand how important it is for you to know who you are dealing with. Nevertheless, I cannot tell you of them, for the only one I know closely is Auntie. Never fear, he will tell you. And in the meantime, I will tell you of my adventures up to this point.

The morning of my journey dawned stormy, so stormy you could hardly call it dawn. The captain hoped it would let up by afternoon, but by that time the storm was worse, if anything. The clouds were low and dark; their bellies drooped in places and rippled like the ocean beneath it. A tongue of cloud reached down from the sky, which was turning green. I saw some of the sailors turn the same color of green, and one leaned over the edge of the dock and retched. I turned away from him and looked up at the sky. The cloud had lengthened, nearly touching the sea, swaying back and forth slowly.
It looked peaceful; calming in a way, but it was deafeningly loud. The women behind me were moaning and kneeling on the ground, begging the captain to make it stop; to stop playing tricks on them. He didn’t answer, but I didn’t think this was his doing.
I was sure it would touch down to the lake, and I was a more than a little curious to see what would happen, but it never did. Still, the captain decided against leaving that day. He had seen those before, he said, sea cyclones, they called them. They were smaller than hurricanes, but the power of a hurricane was in them, and more. Land cyclones were common in some of the places he had traveled, and they were powerful enough to suck men out of their own homes. He must have seen the shock on my face, because he laughed and said that this was not at all uncommon, but not to fear, because sea cyclones were not as powerful as the land ones.

The sea voyage was to be postponed until the bad weather let up, and I expected that to be the next day, as storms here didn’t usually last long. I have to admit, even as everybody else was fleeing to escape the storms, I loved them. I was in awe over the way the lightning flickered and flashed. I danced as the rain came down, until my brown hair turned black, as it always does when it gets wet. I couldn’t help but laugh when the little hailstones came down. In other places, they grew and grew in the clouds until some of them were an inch across, but these never got larger than a very small pea, and they caused no damage.
I walked down to the pond, where I usually went to see the storms. The pond was in a strange place, about ten feet from the edge of a cliff. It was the perfect place for watching lightning from distant storms. Auntie told me that I would be struck by lightning up there, but so far I never had. I’m not saying it was a smart thing to do, but I couldn’t help myself. You wouldn’t be able to either, if you had been there but once.