A SHOWER OF LIGHTNING.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XV, Issue 216, 11 September 1880, Page 4

A SHOWER OF LIGHTNING.

, The Times' Geneva correspondent ■writes under date June 20th :.— A remarkable electrical phenomenon occurred at Clarens on. the afternoon of Thursday last. Heavy masses of rainicloud hid from view the mountains which separate Fribourg from Monitreux, but their summits were from [time to time lit up with vivid flashes of lightning, and a heavy thunder storm seemed to be raging in the valleys of the Avants and the Altias. No rain iwas falling near the lake, and the storm still appeared far off, when a treImendous peal of thunder shook the 'houses of Clarens and Tavel to their ! very foundation. At the same instant a magnificent cherry-tree near the cemjetery, measuring a metre in circumference, was struck by lightning. Some people who were forking in a vineyard, hard by, saw the electric fluid play about a little girl who had been gathering cherries and was already 30 paces I from the tree. She was literally folded' !iu a sheet of fire. the "vine-dressers fled in terror from the spot. In "the 'cemetery, six persons, separated in ithree groups, none of them within .250 ipaces of the cherry-tree, were enveloped in a luminous cloud. They jfelt as if they were Keing struck in the' ?face with hailstones of fine gravel, and 'when they touched each other sparks jof electricity passed from their finger •ends. ;At the same time a column of fire was seen io descend in the direction of Chatelard, and it is- averred that the electric fluid could be distinctly heard as it ran from point" tppoint of the iron railing' of a vault in the "cemetery. The strangest part of tlie story ;is that neither' the little girl, the people' in the cemetery, nor .the vine-dressers appear to have been hurt -the only inconvenience complained of being, an unpleasant sensation in the' joints, as if they had been violently twisted, a sensation which was felt with more or less acutehess for a few hours after. The explanation of this phenomenon is probably to be found in Professor. Colladon's theory of the way in which lightning descends, as described in a letter' ori the effect of lightning on trees printed in the Times of May 18th. The Professor contends that it falls in a shower, hot in a perpendicular flash, and that it runs along brauches of trees until it is all gathered in the trunk, which it bursts or tears open in its effort to reach the ground. In the instance in question the trunk of the cherry-tree is as completely shivered as if it had i been exploded by a charge of dynamite. A part of the shower which destroyed the tree fell where the little girl was standing, but distributed over the grass, left her unharmed, and was so disseminated in the cemetery that the six persons upon whom the electric rain descended escaped without serious injury.