sheet-lightning

I looked long; my eye drank in the scene, and I suppose my brain must have absorbed it; for that night, after lying awake in pleasant fever a long time, watching the silent sheet-lightning, which still played among the retreating clouds, and flashed silvery over the stars, I at last fell asleep; and then in a dream were reproduced the setting sun, the bank of clouds, the mighty rainbow.

The Professor, by Charlotte Bronte 2006

But to have held before him, at the last moment, the picture of a future advantage that he had never once thought of, or discounted for present staying power, it affected him about as much as the view of horizons shown by sheet-lightning.

Two on a Tower 2006

Thrice the great cry rings rippling through the gray air, and over the green sea, and over the far-flooded shell-reefs, where the huge white flashes are,--sheet-lightning of breakers,--and over the weird wash of corpses coming in.

A Memory of Last Island Beach Blogger 2005

Thrice the great cry rings rippling through the gray air, and over the green sea, and over the far-flooded shell-reefs, where the huge white flashes are,--sheet-lightning of breakers,--and over the weird wash of corpses coming in.

Archive 2005-08-01 Beach Blogger 2005

This, with great volumes of sheet-lightning, enabled us at times to see the whole country.

Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa 2004

But I am forgetting that the night with its blackness and mystery came before the sunrise, that the stars seldom looked through the dense leafage, and that the pale green lamps of a luminous fungus here and there, and the cold blue sheet-lightning only served to intensify the solemnity of the gloom.

The Golden Chersonese and the way thither Isabella Lucy 2004

Only very rarely sheet-lightning, mirrored in the water as in a black glass, disclosed the sloping bank opposite.

The Cossacks 2003

“Go?” he said, looking up suddenly; and it seemed to me as if a stream of cold sheet-lightning had crossed and enveloped me for a moment.

Uncle Silas 2003

A little sheet-lightning was observable on the horizon, but it came from a distant storm which did not reach the entrance to the lake.

Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon 2003

To right and left of that strip of living flame the sea was of a curious wine tint, while further off, rather, it was as soft and black as velvet, and in the remote east sheet-lightning was flashing even as though some giant hand were fruitlessly endeavouring to strike a match against the sodden firmament.

Through Russia 2003