Gold Hill Daily News

FOREIGN NEWS.

Singular and Terrible Storm in Switzerland.

New York, July 27. -- Correspondent at Geneva gives an account this morning of a terrible storm which broke over that city at midnight on Wednesday, the 7th instant. At 9 p. m. a few heavy drops of rain began to fall, and at the same time the circumference of the horizon was frightfully illuminated by flashes of sheet lightning, but there was no thunder. Once only during the entire night there was a terrific clap of thunder, but that was when the storm was just over. The lightning gradually increased in intensity, and became continuous. The entire atmosphere seemed to be enveloped in flames, and all this time there was not the slightest movement of air in the streets. At about 11 o'clock small objects lying on the roofs of the houses were caught up and whirled around as if by a cyclone, still there was no movement of air on the streets below. At midnight the tempest came mainly from the Jura range, and from the southwest, traveling in that direction toward the basin of Lake Leman. As it neared the lake it seemed to spread out into a fan-like form, with a front sufficiently wide to embrace the entire city, but did not last much longer than ten minutes. At the end of it, Geneva was wrecked as no army of besiegers could have wrecked it in the same space of time. The storm came in the shape of an almost compact mass of sheet ice, driven horizontally before the tempest's blast. Every gaslight in the streets, save here and there one spared by reason of protecting roofs, was smashed to atoms and extinguished. But the city was not in darkness, for masses of coagulated hail reflected the blue light of the lightning in a ghastly and ominous manner. Windows of manufactories and residences were forced from their fastenings, besides having all the glass shivered, and bed-rooms, staircases and saloons were thrown open to the storm, and in a few minutes half-filled with masses of ice far beyond the immediate power of the inhabitants to remove, for in this storm it was a marked peculiarity that the hail stones or ice fragments compacted themselves in a solid mass as soon as they fell. On the slope of the left bank of the river Arve, in the suburbs of the city, the tiles of many houses were beaten to powder. Stout partitions of wooden plank were pierced by holes such as might have been made by a musket ball. Three persons were killed by the fall of a farm house in the immediate vicinity of the city. Vast quantities of small birds have been picked up killed by the storm, and the bodies of several foxes have been found. Geneva is surrounded by pleasant farms and vineyards and market gardens and these have all been destroyed as completely as if a charge of cavalry had passed over, involving the ruin and despair of the poor and industrious peasants, whose all is now taken from them as effectually as if it had been sunk to the bottom of the sea.