PORT DARWIN.

Westport Times, Volume VII, Issue 1087, 8 July 1873, Page 3

PORT DARWIN.

The writer of a series of ably-pre-pared articles On Port Darwin, furnished to a Victorian paper, has contributed the following description of natural phenomena of observed in the Northern Territory : —" This is the par 'excellence of thunderstorms-. Jove roars his loudest, and shoots quivers full of many-colored arrows of lightning. I 'enjoy the majestic roll the far-echoing deafening peal, and the quick condensed musketry-like sound Of thunder-, the pale green, white, red, and blue flash, and jagged streak of lightning. The finest of these atmospheric effects are found by Alpine climbers-, round the Victorian coast, where travellers by sea have been afforded the treat of continuous lightning for hours playing round the mast-head, performing a kind of weird dance with balls of St. Elmo's fire ; and I have myself, on one rare occasion, in Victoria, seen the whole inky horizon in every quarter brilliantly lit Up by a network of chain lightning, I thought the beauty of the lightning Of that night was un'forgetable, but all has been surpassed by the electric exhibitions and the thunders of these northern skies, The magnificence of a thunderstorm at night here makes an ineffaceable impression, the sight dwells in memory, and is, if I may say So-, framed and carefully stored in a chamber of the brain to be viewed on taiany a future day. The rairi descends in torrents; Jupiter Pluvius and Neptune are in their angriest moodapparent by the Rea, on the beachfoaming and deafening Us with hisses at the terrible deluge vexing it. The long bright flashes show the hills oh the other side of the bay in a strange Unearthly blue light, and even through the darkness we can see the phosphorescent whiteness coloring the waves, so many ghosts of tumbling snowy water, seemingly silent as ghosts, for the thunder drowned their noise. It is in a criticism on Etugo's "By Order of the King '" that Swinburne depicts in most euphonious Words a night storm at sea, when the infuriated waters shriek and complain to the raging heavens. The language of the poet-critic is wanted to do justice to the sight} and so to do justice to the sight and sounds of a midnight thunderstorm at Port Darwin."