A TROPICAL STORM 85 



up at night by constant flashes of lightning. But at length, 

 after a few days of this sultry weather, towards midday the 

 huge cumuli gather thickly over the sky and gradually unite 

 into a dense mass, purple-black in colour, and soon the thunder 

 is heard. It rapidly approaches nearer and nearer, the clouds 

 touching the lower hills, then down darts the forked lightning, 

 followed by the roar of the thunder, and presently a wild rush 

 of wind, as if it came from all quarters at once, tells us that the 

 storm is upon us, and then comes the rain, in big heavy drops 

 for a few seconds and soon in torrents, as if the sluice-gates of 

 the clouds were opened. The lightning is almost incessant ; 

 now and then, in one of the nearer crashes, it is as if the whole 

 artillery of heaven were playing upon the doomed earth ; and 

 for half-an-hour or so there is often hardly any interval between 

 the crashing and reverberations of the thunder peals, the hills 

 around the capital echoing back the roar from the clouds. 

 Certainly a heavy thunderstorm in Madagascar is an awfully 

 grand and glorious spectacle and is not without a considerable 

 element of danger too, especially for anyone caught in the 

 storm in the open, or in a house unprotected by a lightning- 

 conductor. Every house of any pretensions in the central 

 provinces has this safeguard, for every year many people are 

 killed by lightning, some while walking on the road, and others 

 in houses unprotected by a conductor. One often hears of 

 strange freaks, so to speak, played by the lightning ; for 

 instance, one of our college students, travelling with wife and 

 children to the Betsileo, was killed instantaneously, as well as 

 a slave near him, when sitting in a native house, while a child 

 he was nursing at the time escaped with a few burns only. A 

 missionary of the Norwegian Society was struck by lightning, 

 which melted the watch in his pocket, drove the nails out of his 

 shoes, and yet he escaped with no other harm than some burns, 

 which eventually healed. 



A large quantity of rain sometimes falls during such storms 

 in a very short time. On one occasion three and a quarter 

 inches fell in less than half-an-hour ; and as the streets and 

 paths through the capital were formerly all very steep, and there 

 was no underground drainage, it may be imagined what a roar of 

 water there was all over the city after such a storm. The three 

 or four chief thoroughfares were transformed into the beds of 



