One very hot night we were sleeping in the van with all the doors wide open for the sake of coolness. I woke up suddenly to a tremendous clap of thunder with terrific forked lightning and a hurricane of wind, and hailstones the size of a hen's egg. I sprang up and pulled the wind-screen to and shut the side doors, and then woke up Winifred and told her that we must hold on to the back doors for dear life. If once the wind got in it would certainly overturn the van. How we got through the next half-hour I cannot tell. There was no catch inside the back doors, as we always bolted them from the outside, but so sudden and terrific was the storm that there was no time to run round and bolt them. The wind would have swept you off your feet, and you might have been struck by the lightning. For the same reasons it was impossible to make a dash for the farmhouse, and even if we had got there safely by any chance, the caravan would have been smashed to atoms as soon as an open door gave entrance to the wind. The only thing to do was to hold the back doors with our fingers in the chinks, though how we managed it I do not know. The alternative was to abandon the caravan and lie flat on the ground, as one was advised to do in cyclones, but in this case we might have been killed by lightning. All through that half-hour the van quivered like a live thing, and we expected every minute that it would be blown away or broken in. I have never felt so near death. The storm lessened after a time, and then I bolted the back doors. In the morning we found that the farmhouse had been nearly flooded by the torrential rain, a stream of water having poured through the house. They had looked out at us anxiously from time to time, but could no more reach us than we could get to them when the storm was at its worst. Two great hay-wagons had been blown several yards into a fence, and we heard that a shack eight miles off had been blown over, and the settler had had all his limbs broken. We had often heard of these storms before. On one occasion such a storm burst upon a prairie school, smashing in the windows. The young teacher gathered the children into the porch, where they escaped injury. But when they returned to their homes most of them found the shacks blown over and their parents killed. A neighbouring school was entirely wrecked and the teacher and children killed.