GALES AND HURRICANES.
WE wish some great meteorologist would tell the world, with a certain precision and in figures which cannot be coloured for effect, what the difference of force between a gale like that of Saturday-Sunday and an average tropical hurricane really is. The facts must be well known to him, and they are exceedingly obscure to the public, which either neglects or ex- aggerates all tropical phenomena. No man who has resided in the tropics for any time ever faces a gale in England or France . without a feeling that, disastrous as the latter may be, and terrifying as it sometimes is, it is nothing when compared with even an ordinary hurricane in the tropics. There is an intensity of will in the latter, an impression of conscious malignity wholly wanting in the former. A gale cannot rouse your temper as a typhoon will. When, however, he expresses this opinion in public, as he invariably does, and is challenged about it by neighbours, who are vexed by his assumption of special and superior experience, he is often perplexed to give evidence of his thesis, and usually ends by some anecdote of an isolated or exceptional occurrence, which his neighbours believe to be a gross exaggeration, or even a pure invention. How, in- deed, is the poor traveller to prove his case ? The broad facts revealed under cross-examination do not seem to establish his theory, and the special facts which would estab- lish it are either disbelieved, or if the evidence is too strong—as, for instance, the evidence for the awful weight of a storm-wave is—are set down as being somehow beside the question. The facts that a storm-wave in Europe seldom does more than destroy a jetty, and that a storm-wave on the night of October 31st, 1876, did in the Bay of Bengal sweep a large county, and destroy nearly half-a-million of human beings, are not fairly con- trasted, but the tropical disaster is set down almost en- tirely to differences in the lie of the soil. Asked if the hurricane sweeps away brick houses, the traveller is obliged to say "No," the patent fact being that cities in Asia, if built of stone or brick, stand through ages of tempest, just as they do here. European houses are no more blown down in Calcutta, or Madras, or Hong Kong, than they are blown down in London or Dover; while native struc- tures, all prominences, pillars, open halls, and projecting roofs, live on as if architects never heard of wind. A meteoro- logist would say that a Burmese pagoda was often built pur- posely to catch wind, but the hurricanes of a -century sweep over it, and the temple stands, and the priests regard its strength as quite sufficient. Thousands of temples. in Bengal have projecting eaves, which a cyclone ought to lift into the air, bat does not. If the storms are so awful, why does not Cal- cutta, which is all of brick, and not much better built to resist wind than a London suburb, perish once a year ? If the traveller says all roofs are made flat, lest the wind should tear them off, he is told that this is for another reason, to allow of a secluded yet airy promenade ; and, indeed, the statement is not worth much, for buildings without flat roofs stand the gales very well. If he says the wind can blow shutters inwards, he is told that the hinges must be bad ; and if he points to the trees levelled by the storm, he is requested to go into Windsor Great Park just after a gale, and asked if a jungle or forest is ever cleared totally away. It never is, and therein lies one more perplexity. Why, under the worst tropical hurricane, does so much survive Bengal Proper, for instance, is swept every two or three years by a true cyclone, before which, as it seems to those who see it, nothing can live, which strikes paths through the forest as broad and visible as if a steam-roller driven by supernatural force had passed crashing along, and which blows men and cattle off their feet as if they were chips. Yet Bengal in the same districts is one hardly broken mass of orchards or fruit jungles, and they are rarely hart, so rarely, that fruit-culture goes on from decade to decade as a safe and profitable industry. In 1850, the writer saw a mighty cedar bodily lifted into the air, and next day examined a section of the broken trunk, in which all fibres had been twisted, yet a fruit orchard thirty yards off almost entirely escaped. How could that fact, which is not only past denial, but past discussion, be true, if the cyclones of Bengal were so dreadful as they are described to be?
Some part of the difference in the impression created by gales and hurricanes is due, no doubt, to terror. An English gale does not frighten men unless, as sometimes happens, it rocks an upper story till the beds shake, as a tropical hurricane does. It is not, to begin with, accompanied by so much electrical disturbance. In a cyclone in Bengal, the rush of the wind is accompanied by what seem, and usually are, discharges of thunder-bolts, visible balls of fire, rushing downward with a sharp, cracking roar— very unlike, we may remark in passing, the roar of artillery, to which it is compared, resembling rather the clang of iron upon iron, or the breaking of something in the heavens—which strike the buildings, often fatally, within sight. The chance of the bolt, which is by no means a remote one, does not soothe the nerves ; and if the discharges have continued, as often happens, for five or six hours, the watcher, perhaps with a shivering household round him, is in no condition to observe scientifically, or, indeed, to do anything except wait with a certain doggedness, and that rising of the temper which a true hurricane often provokes. The noise is so exasperating, and the wind does seem so devilish in its malice. It does not blow and then leave off, leave off and then blow again, as it does here ; but keeps on blowing with a steady, per- sistent, maddening rash, which is more like the sway of the tide against you when you are half-drowned, than the action of any- thing which in Europe we call wind. We suppose the rush is not quite continuous, for the distinct and shattering blows on the walls which seem to accompany it must really be part of it, and indicate gusts; but there never is a moment while the hurricane lasts when the opening of a shutter or a door would not be followed by the entrance of what seems not wind, but an invisible battering-ram. The writer once saw a shutter in- cautiously loosened while a hurricane was high, and pressing outside like a hydraulic press. In an instant, not only were the shutters blown in and himself flung down as by a heavy weight, but the open door of a large wardrobe standing against the wall was blown off its hinges as if struck by a machine. It had not six inches to recede, and the hinges must have been literally crushed out. The struggle with the continuous impact of a blind force of this kind, pressing inwards for hours, is very terrifying, for no experience will make you believe in the re- sisting power of the walls. It seems as if they must come down, and if they do, you may be dead in five seconds, or worse still, stand suddenly alone in the world. The imprisonment, too, 18 nearly perfect. A hurricane will last sometimes twenty hours, and during that time there is no five minutes during which you can walk ten yards. If you face the wind, it strangles you, literally and actually rendering respiration impossible ; and as you turn round, you are thrown sharply down. There is nothing for it but crawling, and that is difficult, for whatever the scientific explanation may be, it is quite certain that the vertical edge of a tropical hurricane comes, in its full strength, much lower down, nearer the earth, than that of an English gale. All the while, moreover, we repeat for the third time—for after all, it is in this that the special horror of a hurricane oonsiste —the watcher retains, ever rising higher and more resistless, that notion of the deliberate malice of the elements, of being attacked by them, of suffering from the spite and anger of some sentient will, which is at once hostile and perverse. You are fighting, while it lasts, not enduring. This is not the impression of an imaginative or over-sensitive man. It is strongly felt by children, who sometimes grow ill with the fatigue of a storm which has not touched their bodies, but has roused all their energies in " resistance " of hours ; while among adults it is nearly univer- sal and so strong, that very good men iadeed have been known to lose control of themselves, and break into wrathful cursing at the wind, which, nevertheless, was still outside. The terror a hurricane creates will not, however, wholly account for the universal impression of observers that the force of a tropical hurricane, as compared with a European gale, is scientifically underrated. There is a force in the former beyond the apparent difference in pace, a driving strength, persistent and prolonged, which we have never seen thoroughly accounted for. Can the mass of the rushing air be perceptibly weightier, though the pace is not much more rapid, or are its blows directed through a different medium ? A bullet will not strike hard through a very fleet sheet of water. Just before a cyclone, that marvellous clearness of the tropical atmosphere which always so developes eyesight, enabling the short-sighted to see, and making all edges so painfully distinct, is highly exaggerated, till it seems as if a veil were lifted, and you could see to double or treble the usual range. Is not the air so clarified positively thinner than in the North, till the mass of air invading it rushes on with less resistance, and therefore with a heavier impact? Or is that a hopelessly unscientific description of what is, nevertheless, the special fact, which, to the experienced, is the most peremptory warning to clear decks and close portholes for what will be a sharp action, lasting through the night? When in the tropics you can see twice as far as you ought, run to the barometer.
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