Storm Clouds.

Waikato Times, Volume 105, Issue 17613, 18 January 1929, Page 10

Storm Clouds.

Wait yet a little longer, and you shall see those mists gather themselves into white towers, and stand like fortresses along the promontories, massy and motionless, only piled with every instant higher and higher into the sky, and casting longer shadows athwart the rocks; and out of the pale blue of the horizon you will see forming and advancing a troop of narrow, dark, pointed vapours, which will cover the, skv, inch bv inch, with their grey network, and take "the .light off the landscape with an eclipse/which will stop the singing of the birds, and the motion of the leaves together; and then you will see horizontal bars of black shadow forming under them, and lurid wreaths create themselves, you know not how, among the shoulders of the hills; you never see them form, but when you look back to a place which •vas clear an instant ago, there is a cloud or. it, hanging by the precipice's, as a hawk pauses over his prey. . . . And then you will hear the sudden rush of the-awakened, wind, and you will see those watch-toVers of vapour swept away'from their foundations, and waving curtains of opaque rain, let down to the valleys, swinging from the burdened clouds in black, bonding fringes, or, pacing in pale columns along the lake level, grazing its surface into foam as they go. And then, as the sun sinks, you shall see the storm drift for an instant from off the hills, leaving their broad sides smoking and load, ed yet with snow-white torn, steam-like rags of capricious vapour, now gone, now gathered again; while the smouldering sun, seeming not far away, but burning like a red-hot ball beside you, and as if you could reach it. plunges j through the rushing wind and rolling I cloud with headlong fall, as if it meant ! to rise no more, dyeing all the air about it with blood.—John Ruskin.