...they only lose the principal lights; but the things seen in the luminous rains lose both the light and the shadows, because the luminous parts blend with the luminosity of the illuminated air, and the shadowed parts are brightened by the same brightness of the said illuminated air.

In the middle of this chapter there was a city in foreshortening, over which fell a rain lit here and there by the sun, touched in watercolor, a most beautiful thing to see, and indeed by the author's own hand.

[504] On the arrangement of a storm of winds and rain. One sees the air tinted with dark cloudiness in the gathering of tempests, or storms of the sea, which are mixtures of rain and winds with the serpentine courses of the threatening celestial lightning-bolts; and the plants bent to the ground with their leaves overturned upon the drooping branches, which seem to wish to flee from their places, as though terrified by the buffeting of the horrible and fearful flights of the winds, among which pour the whirling courses of the turbulent dust and sand of the sea-shores; the dark horizon of the sky becomes a field of smoky clouds, which, struck by the solar rays that penetrate through the opposite breaks in the clouds, strike the earth, illuminating it beneath their blows; the winds, persecutors of the dust, raise it in clustered globes, bouncing it into the air with a cerulean color mixed with the reddish solar rays that penetrate it. The animals, without guidance and terrified, run about in circles across the various shores;