The Cloudspotter's Guide

Ten minutes into his descent, Rankin should have been reaching the ground, but the enormous draughts of air that surged up the core of the cloud were retarding his fall. Soon the turbulence became much more severe. He had no visual point of reference in the gloomy depths but he sensed that, rather than falling, he was being shot upwards with successive violent gusts of rising air–blasts that were becoming increasingly violent. And then for the first time he felt the full force of the cloud.
‘It came with incredible suddenness–and fury. It hit me like a tidal wave of air, a massive blast, fired at me with the savagery of a cannon…I went soaring up and up and up as though there would be no end to its force.’ Rankin wasn’t the only one being hurled up and down. In the darkness around him, hundreds of thousands of hailstones were suffering the same fate. One minute they were falling downwards, dragging air down with them; the next minute, they were swept back up by the enormous convection currents within the cloud.
With this falling and rising, the hailstones picked up freezing water and grew in size, hardening layer by layer like gobstoppers. These rocks of ice pelted Rankin with bruising force. He was now vomiting from the violent spinning and pounding and he shut his eyes, unable to watch the nightmare unfolding. At one point, however, he did open them to find himself looking down a long black tunnel burrowing through the centre of the cloud. ‘This was nature’s bedlam,’ he said, ‘an ugly black cage of screaming, violent, fanatical lunatics…beating me with big flat sticks, roaring at me, screeching, trying to crush me or rip me with their hands.’ Then the lightning and thunder began.
The lightning appeared as huge, blue blades, several feet thick, which felt as though they were slicing him in two. The booming claps of thunder, caused by the explosive expansion of the air as the enormous electrical charge passed through, were so overpowering up close that they were more like physical impacts than noises. ‘I didn’t hear the thunder,’ he said, ‘I felt it.’ Sometimes he had to hold his breath to avoid drowning from the dense torrents of freezing rain. At one point he looked up just as a bolt of lightning passed behind his parachute. It lit up the canvas, which appeared to the exhausted pilot as an enormous, white-domed cathedral. As the image lingered above him, he thought that he had finally died.