At one point we reached a mountain bluff more open to the wind, and found ourselves in a clearing not made by man. From the rocky summit an awful scene of ruin burst upon us. That soft blue heaven—azure and cloudless as a tranquil sea—it, too, has its storms and windy Scyllas to play havoc among these aërial masts. This was one universal wreck—the wreck of an Armada. Far and wide every tree had been struck down like Canaanitic walls. The very current of the tornado was marked by the lie of the prostrate trunks. At times a confused medley—piles of scarce distinguishable spars and giant hulks—jumbled together as if they had been nine-pins!—showed the eddy of a whirlwind; but generally the trunks were strewn pointing from the north-east like so many magnets: one vast torrent track of destruction marking the course of the _Bora_, the irresistible storm-wind of Illyria. In places we have found the periodic force of this wind utilized by the Bosniacs, who cut the trees a quarter through on the leeward side and leave the rest to the woodcraft of Boreas. [Illustration: Tree struck by Lightning.] But once more we plunge into the primeval shadows to find ourselves among more isolated monuments of ruin. Here it is the artillery of heaven that has been playing on the masted swell of the green Planina. Now we have reached the very focus of an electric storm. The trunks of beech and fir sometimes riven asunder, more generally erect but decapitated, stripped of bark and branches; sometimes shattered columns charred by the aërial explosion, sometimes splintered up into trophies of white spears. Here is one of the most striking witnesses to the stupendous power of lightning that I have ever seen. A beech about eighty feet in height was snapped in two, the upper part hurled on to the slope below, the lower still rooted to the ground, but the hard wood splashed by the thunderer’s bolt—as when a bomb-shell strikes the sea—into gigantic splinters: keen, shapely blades, as much as twenty feet in length.[183]