CLIMATE. 135 to require much time, as no wind blows scarcely forty hours together, from any one point. The phenomenon of thunder and lightning is accompanied in with a more splendid though terrific sublimity, than is known in England . The clouds appear to receive from the earth greater doses of inflammable gas, and to be more abundantly satu¬ rated with caloric. The ascent and expansion of a thunder cloud, from a small spot in the western horizon, has more of the awful majesty of sublimity, than any other pheno¬ menon that I have ever beheld. It commences rising about noon, when it is hot and calm, the sun shining gloriously, and every other part of the sky brightly blue. A little after, a light breeze usually springs up from a point directly opposite to the thunder cloud, which now gradually and slowly moves its white summit upwards, and which not unfrequently exhibits the appearance of immense snow mountains reared over each other, among which imagination easily pictures valleys, ruins, and appearances the most romantic. Meantime, the black gloomy base of the cloud spreads along the horizon; and, as it approaches, we hear the roaring of the distant thunder. The wind still blows from a contrary direction until the sun is overcast, and the cloud reaches the zenith, when the wind immediately shifts, the lightning flashes, sometimes in broad sheets, then in streams of liquid fire, darting in zig-zag serpen¬ tine shapes; and the immediate and tremendous detonation of the atmosphere seems to shake the