AN EQUATORIAL RAIN-STORM. 95 



" As we were passing the equator, we suffered from a tre- 

 mendous thunderstorm. The heat was excessive, not a breath 

 of wind stirring the air. About twelve o'clock a little cloud, 

 about the size of a man's hand, rose in the horizon; gradu- 

 ally it spread, until it hung like a huge mass over the ship. 

 I stood and watched its increase, when suddenly a vivid 

 flash of lightning shot from the heavens and almost blinded 

 me; at the same moment a crash of thunder bellowed round 

 the ship, like the noise of a thousand cannons. The rain 

 now descended, not a sharp, thick shower, such as you may 

 witness in England, but, as it were, all in one mass, and soon 

 every trace of the storm had passed away; the sun burst 

 forth, and the ship and the sails were dried in the course 

 of a few moments." * 



Rain, as we are accustomed to see it in the tem- 

 perate zones, gives us no conception of the violence of 

 these tropical downpours, when the water descends 

 not in drops, but in streams ; as if " all the fountains 

 of the great deep were broken up, and the windows 

 (or floodgates) of Heaven were opened. " f The ancient 

 Hebrews in fact imagined rain to be derived from 

 great reservoirs in the heavens which Moses refers to 

 as "the superior waters." 



These rains are often of such excessive violence as 

 to be in themselves one of the principal factors in the 

 creation of deserts, for wherever the ground is not 

 perfectly flat these torrents soon strip off all vegetable 

 soil, and thus in a few years destroy that which has 

 been the work of centuries. Nature, for this reason, 

 has very generally clothed these regions with forests, 

 which, however, man, in certain cases, has thought fit 



* Popular Account of the Manners and Customs of India, by the 

 Rev. Charles Acland, 1847, p. 2 (description of the voyage out). 

 i Genesis vii, verse 2. 

 See Calmet's Dictionary of the Bible, p. 856 article "Tents." 



