CHAPTER XIII.

RAIN, HAIL AND SNOW.

“I bring fresh showers for the thirsty flowers, From the seas and the streams, I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet birds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother’s breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under. And then again I dissolve in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder.

I am the daughter of earth and water, And the nursling of the sky, I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores, I change, but I can not die. For after the rain, when with never a stain The pavilion of heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams, Build up the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again.”

The cloud is well worth Shelley’s admiration; for though it be but a vague oppressive mist when it enwraps, yet afar it assumes either beauty or gloom, as its seeming whims may dictate. Few are they who have never paused in silent admiration of some beautiful fleecy spirit of the upper deep, changing every instant like the shifting figures of a kaleidoscope, or presenting fantastic likenesses of natural objects, or ever and anon presenting pictures of strange monsters, such as only the superstitious and timid can imagine. Often in times past have nations stood aghast at the portentous signs observed in season of some great calamity. A lurid beam of light from the hidden sun, darting through a rift in the clouds, has been reported as a flaming sword. Shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem, the sky was filled with horses and chariots, rushing to battle. After the siege the wretched survivors recognized too late what was the purpose of the warning.

Wordsworth speaks of these bizarre fantasies:

“Lo! in the burning west the craggy nape Of a proud Ararat! and thereupon, The Ark, her melancholy voyage done. Yon rampant cloud mimics a lion’s shape, There combats a huge crocodile--agape, A golden spear to swallow! and that brown And mossy grove, so near yon blazing town, Stirs and recedes--destruction to escape, Yet all is harmless--as the Elysian shades Where spirits dwell in undisturbed repose, Silently disappear and quickly fades, Meek Nature’s evening comment on the shows That for oblivion take their daily birth From all the fuming vanities of Earth.”

And naught can present so sombre and terrifying an aspect as those phantoms of the air, when mailed with the lightning and flying with the storm.

Yet, upon the cloud the welfare of the human race is dependent, as much as upon any other force in nature: for rain or drouth, famine or plenty, snow or flood, all follow in its path. More than once has rain or storm decided the destiny of nations. Far different might our own lot have been, if that bitter storm of Christmas night, 1777, had not given Washington an opportunity of surprising the carousing Hessians in Trenton, and so reviving the drooping spirits of his countrymen. Hardly would he have escaped, but that the sudden frost hardened the ground and enabled him to steal away by night with his artillery, leaving the chafing Cornwallis the privilege of attacking the deserted camp on the Assanpink in the morning. It was a winter storm that enabled the bold Vermonters to surprise the frowning fortress on the upper Hudson. Napoleon could invade Russia, and drive the Cossack pell-mell before him; no mortal power could control the elements; and his splendid hosts melted away like snow in the breath of the icy storm; and once more the Cossack sang to his steed:

“Now fiercely neigh, my gallant gray; thy breast is broad and ample. Thy hoofs shall prance o’er the fields of France and the pride of her heroes trample.”

Again the “Man of Destiny” was conquered by the elements.

“There was a sound of revelry by night”

as the dread combat of Waterloo prepared. The plan of the “Genius of War” was superb. But all his contests were problems of artillery. “The Lord is on the side of the strongest battalions and heaviest artillery"--bold manner of saying that “when one seeks for the reason of the successes of great generals, one is surprised to find that they did everything necessary to insure them.” But he who would insure success must have the clouds at his beck. That night it rained. The mud crippled his artillery and left the contest to the rifle and bayonet. Waterloo was lost. A shower of rain changed the face of Europe--the history of the world.

Scriptural narrative and the sage Josephus tell us how the Philistine host were cut down by the motley rabble of almost unarmed Israelites, routed mainly by a terrific thunder storm that beat in their faces, flamed upon their weapons, and transformed the disciplined army into a panic-stricken multitude. What might have been the future of Israel and the Jewish faith, but for the intervention of that storm? We need not multiply instances.

The causes that produce the different phenomena of condensation in rain, hail and snow, are not known. Rainfall is the most indefinite of all the atmospheric phenomena in location, quantity, frequency, and distribution. The winds do not vary greatly, one year with another; but such is not the case with the rain. Sometimes the condensation is slow and the moisture falls on the earth as mist. Some suppose that the rainfall is due merely to the cold of great elevations: and this would seem to be well supported by the prevalence of fogs on the Newfoundland banks, where the constant cold current and the occasional icebergs produce a similar degree of cold at sea level, condensing the moisture from the warm seas southward. Others urge that two masses of saturated air of different temperature combine, necessarily condensing the surplus; and the Newfoundland banks are again referred to as an illustration.

Light on fog-banks often presents peculiar and beautiful illusions. The writer remembers having seen a whole town apparently wrapped in flames, the effect being produced by the lights from many windows shining through a light mist that was curling and twisting before a light breeze. Similar causes produce the peculiar halos and mock-suns and mock-moons not infrequently seen in the sky. These, and the beautiful rainbow, all depend upon the reflection and refraction of light in passing through vapor masses. These curious spectacles once had no little terror for the ignorant and superstitious. Shakespeare doubtless alludes to some such case in the dialogue between Hubert and King John, making Hubert narrate an exaggerated version of the facts, as the superstitiously inclined rabble reported it:

_Hubert._--“My lord, they say five moons were seen to-night; Four fixed; and the fifth did whirl about The other four with wondrous motion.”

_King John._--“Five moons?”

_Hubert._--“Old men and beldams in the streets Do prophecy upon it dangerously; Young Arthur’s death is common in their mouths.”

Sometimes an appearance more terrifying to the uninitiated is seen. The traveler in Germany may hear strange myths of specters that frequent the mountains. It was long said that spirits dwelt on the summit of the Matterhorn. Gigantic phantoms roamed the Harz Mountains. One of the best known of all these apparitions is the famous “Specter of the Brocken.” The wanderer on the lonely height at sunrise may see upon a neighboring summit a gigantic shadowy figure, moving about, and mimicking every motion of the traveler. Of course, it is but his shadow on a neighboring fog-bank; but the solution remained a mystery long enough to terrify many a simple peasant into needless invocations of the saints. But similar appearances are occasionally observable in many localities. The Spaniard Ulloa records that on the mountain Pambamarca, in Peru, he saw his shadow on the cloud surrounded by three complete circular rainbows. The same peculiarity has been frequently noticed elsewhere, but never on so grand a scale. We find no peculiar myths concerning halos in general, it being generally considered that they announce the approach of rain; and the fog-bank is of no especial danger save to the seaman, or the traveler overtaken and blinded by one in mountain fastnesses; though their depressing influence has led one writer to exclaim:

“Fly, fly, profane fogs! fly hence far away, Taint not the pure springs of the springing day With your dull influence; it is for you To sit and scowl upon night’s heavy brow.”

And the fog, though not ornamental--unless we except that dry haze, the Indian summer--may be useful in preventing a frost, or in keeping a parched earth from drying too rapidly. But for this last, all the world prefers the rain, and sings with Longfellow:

“How beautiful is the rain! After the dust and heat, In the broad and fiery street, In the narrow lane, How beautiful is the rain! How it clatters along the roofs Like the tramp of hoofs! How it gushes and struggles out, From the throat of the overflowing spout, Across the window pane it pours and pours, And swift and wide, With a muddy tide, Like a river, down the gutter roars The rain, the welcome rain.”

Not always welcome; for we find the same poet moaning:

“The day is cold, and dark, and dreary, It rains, and the rain is never weary.”

And certainly, the farmer who looks through the driving rain at his ruined crops has little sentiment left to expend upon its beauty. But the world over, after a rain every feature of a landscape stands out with singular clearness; the haze commonly prevalent has for the nonce disappeared.

The amount of rainfall varies so vastly in different countries, that it would be tedious to the reader to enter upon a detail of the different amounts. In general it is greatest upon those portions of the land first reached by regular incoming sea winds. So in South America, Peru and southern Ecuador are practically without rain, as the Andes and the Amazon forests deprive the trade winds of their moisture ere they reach the Pacific coast; while southern Chili seldom sees the sun; lying in the track of the return trades, whose moisture is at once precipitated by the Andes. So in India the monsoon which pours deluges of water along the southwestern coasts, brings but twenty-three inches a year to the central plateau; and by the time Central Asia is reached, it is so dry the steppes of Tartary must remain almost a desert. And in our own land, we find in general the heaviest rain from the eastern coast to the central region: while the western plateau along the eastern slopes of the Rockies is unusually dry, and liable to protracted drouths: and in the Mojave desert, and in southeastern California, the rainfall is less than two inches per year. On the North Pacific coast the rainfall increases rapidly, as in the southern Andes; but in general our highest mean rainfall is in the southern portion of the Gulf States. The highest average in the world is so far credited to Sumatra, one hundred and thirty inches. This, of course, refers to tracts of considerable size; for a small tract in Assam, on a mountain slope, where is the town of Cherrapungee, has a rainfall of four hundred and ninety-three and two-tenth inches per annum--more than forty-one feet! Twenty-two feet of rain have fallen there in a single month! A better idea of this may be obtained by observing that our average rainfall, from Missouri eastward, is about three feet a year. The rains of the Amazon and Congo basins are enormous, and would suffice to swell our Mississippi to as great volume as either of them. On the other hand, the lowest recorded rainfall for a large tract is that of Greenland--fifteen and five-tenth inches; while Australia, with fifteen and seven-tenth inches, is but little better off. It may be mentioned here, that the term “mean rainfall” includes snow also: ten inches of snow being ordinarily estimated as one inch of rain.

A point long mooted, now considered as definitely settled, was, the influence of forests upon rainfall. There was no doubt that forests retarded the descent of water into the streams, and so lessened the danger of floods; and observations of late years have shown that the forest also increases the amount of rainfall, aiding in the work of condensation. In the northern lumber regions, the rainfall in the cleared tracts is less than in the time of the forests, while floods are more sudden and dangerous.

These general features being noticed, mention of a few extraordinary rainfalls may be of interest. The most remarkable rain in one day occurred September 13, 1879, at Purneah, in Bengal, when thirty-five inches fell; about as much as Illinois gets in a year. At Nagina, thirty-two and four-tenth inches fell. Some extraordinary showers have been recorded in our own country, the most rapid being one and one-half inches in five minutes: the most rapid long one, ten inches in three hours; but no record of a day in anywise approaches the Bengal rain.

A peculiar phenomenon of occasional occurrence in the Western States is that of “cloud-bursts,” or “water-spouts” as they are sometimes called, when immense masses of water fall in a few minutes. As the entire amount of moisture that can be held by the atmosphere at ordinary temperature would make but two inches of rain, it must follow that to produce such downpours as are here recorded, immense quantities of moisture from a wide area must be drawn in and condensed rapidly at a single point. Perhaps this is done by a reverse cyclonic movement, the atmosphere rapidly descending in a “spout,” instead of ascending.

August 11, 1876, a tremendous downpour occurred at Fort Sully, Dakota: “and on the opposite side of the Missouri River, the water draining from a canon was reported to have moved out in a solid bank three feet deep and two hundred feet wide.” Two others of nearly equal violence occurred during the same month: one in Utah, and one in Kansas. “June 12, 1879, on Beaver Creek, ninety miles south of Deadwood, Dakota, there was a cloud-burst, which, without a gradual rise of water, in a few minutes covered the country and drowned eleven persons.” A cloud-burst in June, 1884, sent a torrent eight feet deep from the hillside into Jefferson, Montana, drowning several persons. Another one in June, 1885, destroyed a town in Mexico, drowning over one hundred and seventy of its eight hundred inhabitants. Cloud-bursts near Pittsburg, on the night of July 25, 1874, destroyed $500,000 worth of property, and drowned or crushed in the wrecks, one hundred and thirty-four persons. A cloud-burst in Arizona, August 6, 1881, changed the Hassayampa River from a dry ravine at sunset to a river a mile wide and from two to fifteen feet deep by 11 P.M.; by noon next day the river was again dry. Two days later a downpour at Central City, Colorado, suddenly left from four to six feet of water in the two principal streets.

Snow is practically unknown over two-thirds of the land surface of the earth, and the damage done by it is confined largely to the inland regions of the temperate zone. And even then heavy snowfalls do no great injury unless followed by extremely cold wind. The blizzard laden with “icy sand” is fearful.

“The night sets in on a world of snow, And the air grows sharp and chill, And the warning roar of a fearful blow Is heard on the distant hill. And the Norther! See! On the mountain peak, In his breath, how the old trees writhe and shriek! He shouts on the plains, Ho-ho! Ho-ho! He drives from his nostrils the blinding snow, And growls with a savage will.”

The extreme ranges of temperature produced suddenly by high area or anti-cyclonic storms are the most dangerous features of the blizzard; while the only damage done by snow is to blind the person caught away from home, and cause him to lose his way. The past ten years have been marked by severe storms in our own winter season, the most terrible being that of January 11, 1888, when the wind blew from thirty to fifty miles an hour, and large numbers of persons in the west were frozen, and thousands of cattle perished. At Helena, Montana, the thermometer fell fifty degrees in four and one-half hours. The snow-laden wind reached a speed of forty miles an hour at Galveston, Texas. At Brownsville, Texas, the temperature fell forty degrees in eight hours. Two months later came an exceedingly heavy snow attended by high winds, in the eastern Middle States. This is popularly known as the “New York blizzard.” Snow drifted in many places ten or fifteen feet deep.

“The fence was lost, and the wall of stone, The windows blocked, and the well-curb gone, The haystack had grown to a mountain lift, And the woodpile looked like a monstrous drift, As it lay by the farmer’s door.”

The chief damage in all snow storms results from the temporary obstruction of roads and cessation of business. No very great destruction of human life has ever resulted, save in case of armies overtaken by the storm. Napoleon lost four hundred and fifty thousand men on his Russian expedition. Both armies suffered terribly in the recent Russo-Turkish war, as they lay facing each other at Shipka Pass.

The constant accumulations of snow in the colder regions of the earth produce those immense rivers of ice known as glaciers, the fragments breaking from which as they enter the sea are known as icebergs. These, borne by currents to the southward, have no small influence in modifying the climate. In mountainous regions the accumulations of snow and ice produce snow-slides and avalanches; but owing to their entirely local character, the damage wrought by them is comparatively insignificant, not even approaching the lightning in the total.

Hail has been far more destructive. As stated elsewhere, the cause of hail is hitherto unexplained. The storm usually travels in narrow belts. Many are the wonderful tales told of it. It is said that May 8, 1802, a mass of ice weighing eleven hundred pounds fell in Hungary. Again, we hear of an ice-block the size of an elephant, which fell near Seringapatam, in the reign of Tippoo Sahib. The good father Huc, in his travels in Tartary, reported the fall of an ice-block the size of a millstone, which, in very warm weather, required three days to melt. And we are told that in the time of Charlemagne, there fell hailstones fifteen feet long, eleven feet wide and six feet thick. All these we steadfastly do not believe.

Yet, there are well authenticated records of many disastrous hail storms and enormous hailstones. A storm in France, in 1788, traveled in two bands: one, four hundred and twenty by ten miles; the other, five hundred by five miles. Five million dollars worth of property was destroyed. In 1865 a severe storm swept a wide path from Bordeaux to Belgium, accumulating in such masses that it was not all melted in one or two localities for four days. One bed was one and one-fourth miles long and two-fifths of a mile wide, containing twenty-one million cubic feet. Doubtless similar accumulations in depressions, adhering together, gave rise to the tales of enormous blocks mentioned above.

An enormous hail storm in India, in 1853, is said to have killed eighty-four persons and three thousand cattle. During a storm at Naini Tal, in 1855, hailstones weighing one and one-half pounds fell. Our own land has had a number of severe hail storms within the past ten years, that have done immense damage to crops, and occasionally killed cattle, while smaller animals have perished by hundreds. Frequent are the records of hailstones as large as oranges, goose-eggs, and occasionally as large as a fist, with gathered drifts two or three feet deep. Europe has also had several of her smaller towns nearly destroyed by combined flood and hail. Yet, none of these equal in fatality the great hail storm of two years since at Moradabad, India.

It smashed in windows, glass doors and the lighter roofs, “The verandas were blown away by the wind. A great part of the roof fell in, and the massive pucca portico was blown down. The walls shook. It was nearly dark outside, and hailstones of enormous size were dashed down with a force which I have never seen anything to equal. * * * There were long ridges of hail one or two feet in depth. * * * Not a house in the civil station that did not receive the most serious injury.

“Two hundred and thirty deaths in all have been reported up to the present time. The total number may be safely put as under two hundred and fifty. Men caught in the open and without shelter, were simply pounded to death by the hail.”

Spain and southern France have on record some showers of extremely large hailstones. In 1829, masses of ice weighing four and one-half pounds fell at Cazorta, Spain. Houses were stove-in by them. During a hurricane in the south of France, in 1844, there fell ice-masses weighing eleven pounds.

Mysterious and ominous to those ignorant of their cause have been the many showers of “ink, blood, sulphur,” falls of red or green snow, and similar phenomena. Such things were believed to betoken the wrath of God, and to forebode war, famine, pestilence, flood, and other dire calamities. Of course, the good people knew exactly what any shower meant--after the calamity occurred. When it didn’t occur, the shower was simply a warning.

That such phenomena are readily explained goes without saying; and not a few of the wise of days past have refused to be seriously alarmed, though they could not find a correct solution of the mystery. Some of the philosophic minds of other days endeavored to explain these occurrences by supposing blood vaporized from battle-fields was mingled with rain, not knowing that the red portion of the blood can not evaporate.

The microscope has solved these mysteries. The rains of blood are merely stained by earthy matter: sometimes organic, gathered by the wind; sometimes volcanic dust, thrown out by eruptions; and in one case, where numerous blood-spots appeared on houses and fences in Provence, in 1608, and the priests asserted it was the work of the devil, the spots at length proved to be the excrement of butterflies. Rains of melted sulphur have been found to owe their color to the yellow pollen of pine trees. Ink is merely sooty rain-water. Showers of this character are more frequent than might be supposed. More than a score have occurred in Europe in the present century; and a number in this country. Red and green snow owe their color to microscopic vegetable life, and are quite commonly met with in the Arctic world. One bold headland has long been known as Crimson Cliff, from the extensive deposits of red snow there.