OF THE KINGDOM OF BENGALE         445

toward the heavens, roused me from my sleep and pointed
out another rainbow as beautiful and as well defined as the
last. You are not to imagine that I mistake a halo for an
iris. I am familiar with the former, because during the
rainy season at Dehli, there is scarcely a month in which a
halo is not frequently seen round the moon. But they
appear only when that luminary is very high above the
horizon: I have observed them three and four nights
successively, and sometimes I have seen them doubled.
The iris of which I speak was not a circle about the moon,
but was placed in an opposite direction, in the same
relative position as a solar rainbow. Whenever I have
seen a night iris, the moon has been at the -west and the
iris at the east. The moon was also nearly complete in its
orb, because otherwise the beams of light would not, I
conceive, be sufficiently powerful to form the rainbow; nor
was the iris so white as the halo, but more strongly marked,
and a variety of colours was even discernible. Thus you
see that I am more happy than the ancients, who, accord¬
ing to Aristotle, had observed no lunar rainbows before his
time.

In the evening of the fourth day we withdrew, as usual,
out of the main channel to a place of security, and passed
a most extraordinary night. Not a breath of wind was
felt, and the air became so hot and suffocating that we
could scarcely breathe. The bushes around us were so full
of glow-worms that they seemed ignited; and fires resem¬
bling flames arose every moment to the great alarm of our
sailors, who did not doubt that they were so many devils.
Two of these luminous appearances were very remarkable.
One was a great globe of fire, which continued longer than
the time necessary to repeat a Pater, the other looked like
a small tree all in flames, and lasted above a quarter of an
hour.

The night of the fifth day was altogether dreadful and
perilous. A storm arose so violent, that although we were,
as we thought, in excellent shelter under trees, and our