As the sun gets every day more nearly vertical at noon, on his passage towards the southern tropic, the heat increases, and the electric tension of the air becomes more oppressive. For a week or more previous to the actual commencement of the rains, the clouds gather towards evening, and the heavens are lighted up at night by constant flashes of lightning. But at length, after a few days of this sultry weather, towards midday the huge cumuli gather thickly over the sky and gradually unite into a dense mass, purple-black in colour, and soon the thunder is heard. It rapidly approaches nearer and nearer, the clouds touching the lower hills, then down darts the forked lightning, followed by the roar of the thunder, and presently a wild rush of wind, as if it came from all quarters at once, tells us that the storm is upon us, and then comes the rain, in big heavy drops for a few seconds and soon in torrents, as if the sluice-gates of the clouds were opened. The lightning is almost incessant; now and then, in one of the nearer crashes, it is as if the whole artillery of heaven were playing upon the doomed earth; and for half-an-hour or so there is often hardly any interval between the crashing and reverberations of the thunder peals, the hills around the capital echoing back the roar from the clouds. Certainly a heavy thunderstorm in Madagascar is an awfully grand and glorious spectacle and is not without a considerable element of danger too, especially for anyone caught in the storm in the open, or in a house unprotected by a lightning-conductor. Every house of any pretensions in the central provinces has this safeguard, for every year many people are killed by lightning, some while walking on the road, and others in houses unprotected by a conductor. One often hears of strange freaks, so to speak, played by the lightning; for instance, one of our college students, travelling with wife and children to the Bétsiléo, was killed instantaneously, as well as a slave near him, when sitting in a native house, while a child he was nursing at the time escaped with a few burns only. A missionary of the Norwegian Society was struck by lightning, which melted the watch in his pocket, drove the nails out of his shoes, and yet he escaped with no other harm than some burns, which eventually healed.