When one looked up at the
illuminated sky, one seemed to be looking down at a mountainous
landscape. The clouds, rent apart, torn, and shattered, were like
masses of high hills, inky black on the summits, with copper-colored
precipices and glistening purple slopes; and in remote depths of the
valleys, where there should have been lakes of water, there were lakes
of fire. In the intervals between the flashes, when suddenly the sky
became dark, one had a sensation that the earth had swung right again,
and that it was now under one's feet as usual instead of being over
one's head.
Dale plodding along thought of all he had read about thunder-storms.
It was quite true, what he said to Norah. Lightning strikes the
highest object. That was why trees had got such a bad name for
themselves; although, as a fact, you were often a jolly sight safer
under a tree than out in the open. Salisbury Plain, he had read, was
the most dangerous place in England; for the reason that, because of
its bareness, it made a six-foot man as conspicuous, upstanding an
object as a church tower or a factory chimney would be elsewhere. And
he thought that if any cattle had been left out in those wide flat
fields near the Baptist Chapel, they were now in great peril.
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