We had scarcely begun to settle down again, and regain the control of our nerves after this distinctly startling adventure, when the dense canopy of black cloud overhead was rent asunder by a flash of lightning, steel-blue, keen, and dazzlingly vivid, that seemed to strike the water within a dozen fathoms of us, while simultaneously we were deafened by a crackling crash of thunder of such appalling loudness and violence that one might have been excused for believing that the very foundations of the earth had been riven asunder.
