Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 May 1894 — Perpetual Thunder and Lightning [ARTICLE]

Perpetual Thunder and Lightning

The phenomenon known as lightning, followed by a rolling, reverberating report, recognized as thunder, is common to a wide zone of the earth, but it is not generally known that there are localities where the * vivid flashes and the deafening peals are incessant The most notable of these continuous lightning districts is on the eastern coast of the. island of San Domingo, a leading member of the group of the West Indies. It is not meant' that the lightning is here, continuous the year round, but that, with the commencQmen.t of the rainy season, comes this zig-zag feature of electric illumination, which is then continuous day and night for weeks. The storm center is not continuously local, but shifts over a considerable area, and, as thunder is seldom heard over a greater distance than eight miles, and the lightning in the night will illuminate so as, to be seen thirty miles, there may be days in some localities where the twinkle on the sky is in a continuous succession while the rolling reports are absent. Then, again, come days and nights when the electric artillery is piercing in its detonations; and especially is this the case when two separate local cloud centers .join, as it were, in an electric duel, and,, as sometimes occurs, a third participant appears to add to the elemental warfare. Then there is a blazing sky with blinding vividness and stunning peals that seem to pin the listener to the earth. Long before the echoes can die away come others, until tho. auricular mechanism seems hardened' into chaos.—Pittsburg Dispatch. ■ .i oa/ .j «