As a rule we only fear the direct lightning. This is a great mistake. There are many cases of lightning striking from a distance.
For example, at the end of May, 1866, an English coastguard was making his rounds on the coast of one of the Shetland Isles, when a flash of lightning passed near him, striking a great rock. The unfortunate man was completely blinded, and plunged into darkness thus suddenly, he would inevitably have fallen down an abyss, if his companions, attracted by his cries, had not come to the rescue and taken him home.
Here is another case:—
On September 24, 1826, a terrible storm burst over Versailles, accompanied by a great deal of thunder and lightning. At the moment when the lightning struck Galli's farm, an old man who was in a street in Versailles, at a distance of two kilometres from the farm, suddenly felt a violent shock, accompanied by a feeling of oppression and giddiness and a semi-paralysis of the tongue and the whole of his left side. Next morning this had passed away, but in the evening at the same time as the shock had occurred, he felt similar sensations of fainting, and it was the same to the end of the week. It would be well to remark here that at the moment of the accident, M. B—— happened to be near the wall of a house, not far from the metallic tube which conducted the rain-water into the level of the pavement.
The following phenomenon, to which we have already alluded, is no less curious:—
On July 22, 1868, at about 7 o'clock in the evening, at Gien-sur-Cure (Nièvre), the thunder had been growling violently for some time, when all of a sudden the lightning struck a thatched house, which it set on fire. At the same time a woman who was in a house ten yards away, felt a shock, and saw the tiled floor rise beneath her. Her two sabots were broken on her feet, and a bottle of Holy Water with which she was blessing the house was broken in her hand, only the neck remained in her fingers. She herself suffered nothing but the shock. Nineteen of the tiles were flung in all directions.
Here is another very remarkable case of ascending lightning, published in the Comptes Rendus of the Academie des Sciences:—
At Porto-Alegre, on June 9, 1870, at 2 a.m., during a violent storm, on the property of M. Laranja e Oliveira, at Brazil, a servant was entering the house; he was about ten yards away, when a flash of lightning illuminated it; at the same moment he felt a great tingling in the flesh of his feet, then in his legs, then all over his body, and finally in his head, on which the hair stood on end to such an extent that he was obliged to hold his hat on in order to prevent its falling off. At the same time, a white flame burst from the ground about two yards in front of him, accompanied by a shower of sparks. Terrified by such a phenomenon, which he attributed to souls from another world, he thought he was petrified to the spot; finally, he ran away. Anything metallic which he had about him at the time of this occurrence became magnetized. A key which was in his pocket remained magnetic for two days.
Thus, as well as the ordinary fulguration, in which the lightning (which we imagine descends from the clouds) acts directly on the body, and the lightning which strikes indirectly, there are other electric shocks which can be experienced by men and animals. Notable among these is the striking from the earth, commonly known as choc de retour, and which is in reality only an instance of the ascending current, or of lightning striking from a distance. We must also describe the striking by a man who has been struck.
The Abbé Richard, in his Histoire de l'Air, tells the following story:—