Читать книгу Great Disasters and Horrors in the World's History - Allen Howard Godbey - Страница 7
Оглавление
FORMS OF CLOUDS.
a diminution of temperature. It is of a dark-leaden hue, changing into grey. This is the most common form of cloud in polar latitudes; and, during the cold season, it is the most frequent of the temperate zones.
If a moist current cross a mountain range, it loses its moisture in the cold region, and growing narrower as it descends the other slope, presents the phenomena of a warm dry wind from the mountains. Thus the wind that brings rain to Norway, gives warm fair weather to Sweden. Of the same character are the hot winds of Switzerland, called Foëhn winds, and the Chinook winds which blow from the eastward into Idaho, Washington, and western Montana. Similar winds occur occasionally in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Peru. These hot winds must not be confounded with the hot and poisonous winds from desert regions described before.
Such, in fine, are the noted varying intermittent, or periodic winds. However uncertain they may appear at first thought, they are obedient to the same unchanging laws that bind the universe into one harmonious whole. No doubt the ancients, if they had been acquainted with their office, would have personified them as the nymphs of the seasons. But, knowing naught of the wonderful immutable laws that bind them, they could only say to each,
“We know not whence thou com’st, or whither goest,
When round our homes thy wizard blast thou blowest.”
In eternal law and harmony they found only endless confusion and wild caprice. Man interpreted nature by man.
Yet they are the angels of the seasons, these air-spirits, sent by an allwise Providence to bring the rain and the snow, and the sunshine and storm in their season, to give seed to the sower and bread to the eater; that while man shall dwell on earth, seedtime and harvest and summer and winter may not cease. So they wander, clothing the tropics with emerald cloaks of strangest beauty, and robing the poles with ermine and crystal: painting with rainbow-tints the autumn leaves, and touching with virgin blush the orchards in spring; in all things obeying the decree of Him who hath set the seasons in order and made everything beautiful in its time.
