All the phenomena of this explosion are stupendous:  thunder, as we are accustomed to be awed by it in Europe, affords but the faintest idea of its overpowering grandeur in Ceylon, and its sublimity is infinitely increased as it is faintly heard from the shore, resounding through night and darkness over the gloomy sea.  The lightning, when it touches the earth where it is covered with the descending torrent, flashes into it and disappears instantaneously; but, when it strikes a drier surface, in seeking better conductors, it often opens a hollow like that formed by the explosion of a shell, and frequently leaves behind it traces of vitrification.[1] In Ceylon, however, occurrences of this kind are rare, and accidents are seldom recorded from lightning, probably owing to the profusion of trees, and especially of coco-nut palms, which, when drenched with rain, intercept the discharge, and conduct the electric matter to the earth.  The rain at these periods excites the astonishment of a European:  it descends in almost continuous streams, so close and so dense that the level ground, unable to absorb it sufficiently fast, is covered with one uniform sheet of water, and down the sides of acclivities it rushes in a volume that wears channels in the surface.[2] For hours together, the noise of the torrent, as it beats upon the trees and bursts upon the roofs, flowing thence in rivulets along the ground, occasions an uproar that drowns the ordinary voice, and renders sleep impossible.

[Footnote 1:  See DARWIN’S Naturalist’s Voyage, ch. iii. for an account of those vitrified siliceous tubes which are formed by lightning entering loose sand.  During a thunderstorm which passed over Galle, on the 16th May, 1854, the fortifications were shaken by lightning, and an extraordinary cavity was opened behind the retaining wall of the rampart, where a hole, a yard in diameter, was carried into the ground to the depth of twenty feet, and two chambers, each six feet in length, branched out on either side at its extremity.]

[Footnote 2:  One morning on awaking at Pusilawa, in the hills between Kandy and Neuera-ellia, I was taken to see the effect of a few hours’ rain, during the night, on a macadamised road which I had passed the evening before.  There was no symptom of a storm at sunset, and the morning was bright and cloudless; but between midnight and dawn such an inundation had swept the highway that in many places the metal had been washed over the face of the acclivity; and in one spot where a sudden bend forced the torrent to impinge against the bank, it had scooped out an excavation extending to the centre of the high road, thirteen feet in diameter, and deep enough to hold a carriage and horses.]

This violence, however, seldom lasts more than an hour or two, and gradually abates after intermittent paroxysms, and a serenely clear sky supervenes.  For some days, heavy showers continue to fall at intervals in the forenoon; and the evenings which follow are embellished by sunsets of the most gorgeous splendour, lighting the fragments of clouds that survive the recent storm.