We’ve all seen threatening thunderheads, poised to loose their lightning and thunder and deluges, but the cloud we saw two nights ago had a form that seemed as if it had risen above us and was ready to bend and crash down.

The rest of the sky was clear except for 180° away, where the cloudscape was a mix:

Photos never do justice to clouds––how can we reproduce the experience, where our eyes take in half the sky, with just a small window’s view? But this cloud also had a looming ominous presence like a solid creature in the sky looking down on us which is hard to convey.

It would have been easy to project an angry deity onto this phenomenon, and then see confirmation in the huge thunderstorm that followed (but that was three hours later, when this celestial warning was long gone). The heavy rain was very welcome after a couple of weeks of temperatures above 100°, and there were few lightning-started wildfires, so the omens weren’t so bad after all.