That first terrible flash of lightning and crash of thunder was, however, only the beginning of the most awful electric storm that it has ever been my fate to witness, the sky, now black as night, being rent in half a dozen different directions at once by fierce, baleful flashes, green, blue, crimson, and sun-bright, while the bombarding of the thunder was absolutely terrifying, even to us who were by this time growing quite accustomed to tropical storms.  With it there came frequent short, sharp, intermittent bursts of rain that swept across our decks, stinging the exposed skin like shot, and enshrouding everything beyond a couple of fathoms away in impenetrable obscurity.  Now, too, there came, at irregular but quickly recurring intervals, savage gusts of wind that smote the ship as though she had been but a child's toy, heeling her down until her lee rail was awash, and holding her thus for two or three minutes at a time, then easing up for a short space, the "easing up" intervals, however, steadily growing more abbreviated, while the gusts that invariably followed them rapidly grew in intensity and fury, until after the passage of one that had pinned us down for three or four minutes, with our lee sheer-poles buried in the smother, I thought that the time had arrived to heave-to, and gave the order to do so.  Nor was I any too soon; for the sea was rapidly rising, and a quarter of an hour later we probably could not have accomplished the feat without having had our decks swept.  The gale now rapidly increased in intensity, the gusts of wind ever growing stronger and more furious, and succeeding each other more rapidly, until at length the intervals between them became so brief as to be practically imperceptible, the strength of the wind now being equal to that of a heavy gale, and momentarily growing stronger as gust after gust swooped down upon us. The blinding, drenching showers that occasionally swept us were no longer composed of fresh water only, for there was a strong mingling of salt-water in them that was none other than the tops of the waves, torn off by the terrific blasts of wind and hurled along horizontally in the form of vast sheets of spray.  The sea, meanwhile, was rising with astounding rapidity, taking into consideration the fact that, as just stated, the height of the combers was greatly reduced by the enormous volumes of water that were scooped up from the ocean's surface by the fury of the wind; moreover the sea was short, steep, and irregular, much more nearly resembling the breakers on a coast in shallow water, than the long, regular, majestically moving seas of the open ocean.  The _Dolphin_, therefore, despite her beautiful model and the reduction of her tophamper, was beginning to make exceedingly bad weather of it, frequently burying herself to her foremast, and careening so heavily that during some of her lee rolls it was impossible to maintain one's footing on deck except by holding on to something.