Lightning streaks like gunfire through the clouds, volleys of thunder shake the air.

The line renders a desert thunderstorm in martial terms: lightning becomes “gunfire” and thunder arrives in “volleys.” Abbey often frames wilderness experience as visceral, even violent—not to glorify war, but to convey nature’s scale and indifference to human comfort. The simile collapses the distance between human conflict and elemental weather, suggesting that what people imitate in battle (shock, noise, sudden illumination) already exists, more powerfully, in the nonhuman world. The sentence’s rhythm—quick flash followed by rolling impact—mimics the storm’s sequence, turning observation into an auditory-visual experience.