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5 am Sunday, August 17, 1969
250 miles south of Mobile, Alabama
Latitude 26.9 North, longitude 87.9 West

Ten miles above the Gulf of Mexico, at the rim of the great horn-shaped vortex, there was only a deafening darkness and the roar of the molecules. Sheets of lightning, electric-blue and glittering, arced across Camille’s moonlit maw. For a moment the vast slope-sided throat was visible in metallic light, and down inside, great ragged shrouds of moisture shape-shifting from ice to vapor and back spun furiously up the roaring eyewalls, like ten-mile-high ghosts. As the storm sucked these phantasmal vapors up into the eyewall, they cooled and begin condensing, and gray veils of rain cascaded down the interior walls of the tower, in the process releasing great blasts of heat energy, further stoking the inexorable engine of the storm.

The thing was like a malignant organism, sprawling across the curvature of the earth. Its great spiralling arms trailed phalanxes of thunderstorms fifty miles wide and hundreds of miles long. It spun off eddies of cyclonic wind that turned into tornadoes over land, waterspouts over water. It was a kind of gigantic atmospheric machine, feeding hungrily on warm, wet air off the tropical oceans and from as far south as the Brazilian rain forests, down across the equator.

This feeding seemed to feed upon itself: The furiously-spinning vortex created a low-pressure center, almost a void, which vaccuumed up heated water vapor from unimaginable distances, convulsing the atmosphere up to the edge of the stratosphere more than ten miles high. The inrushing, heated air fueled the spin, which deepened the void, which further accelerated the storm.

The result was a colossal convection cell — actually, hundreds of cells organized into a great ring by the spinning vortex — so powerful that it swallowed up a quarter-million tons of water vapor every second, a total cargo of over two billion tons of water drawn up into the air itself and held there as if it weighed no more than a hummingbird.

Strangely, pouring down the center of the storm’s eye, there was a warm, gentle channel of downrushing air. Nature’s little joke: That at the very heart of this savage storm, there was a downdraft, an exhaled breath, soft as a summer day. But surrounding this descending plume there was an unearthly stillness, so that straight up through the eye, the velvety, moonlit heavens were clearly visible, glittering with faraway stars, the distant crucibles of matter where atoms, riven to their core, released the power that fuels the universe. This storm bore more kinship to those distant star-forges than to the tiny, wretched humans far below, most huddled fearfully in their darkened houses or storm shelters, listening uneasily to the tempest outside their doors.

The storm’s sound was entirely inhuman. People who have heard the noise and lived to tell of it said it reminded them of things they knew — the roar of freight trains, jet engines revving on the runway. Sometimes the wind’s scream accelerated up above human hearing, a piercing shriek that simply disappeared somewhere above sixteen thousand cycles per second. In truth, it was a sound that came from the crucibles of heaven, from the anvils of the stars. The result was chaos, a numinous darkness, and rain beyond reckoning.