Dinuzulu

“ The cloud in the horizon began to extend itself, increasing and gradually rising and covering the sky, and the old man’s prediction was evidently about to be fulfilled. A dead calm lay upon the river, and a preternatural stillness clothed in a sort of stupor the whole face of nature around us; while low muttering rolls of thunder from the dark cloud, and the frequent, sudden, crinkling lightning, glittering across its surface, warned us that we were about to encounter one of those violent and terrible thunder-storms which not unfrequently occur in this part of the country. ”

“ Who freed the winds, and the vast clouds unrolled.
The storms no more the skies invest,
The winds are heard no more;
Low in the chambers of the west,
Whence they arose, they've sunk to rest;
The sunset storm is o'er.
The clouds that were so wildly driven
Across the darkened brow of heaven
Are gone, and Even
Comes in her mild and sober guise,
Her perfumed air, her trembling skies,
And Lama, with her star-gemmed, glorious crown,
From her high throne in heaven, upon the world looks down. ”

“ Behind it, westward and seaward, all's clear; but when the wind out of that blue clearness comes over the ridge of the earth-cloud, at that moment and that line, its own moisture congeals into these white—I believe, ice-clouds; threads, and meshes, and tresses, and tapestries, flying, failing, melting, reappearing; spinning and unspinning themselves, coiling and uncoiling, winding and unwinding, faster than eye or thought can follow: and through all their dazzling maze of frosty filaments shines a painted window in palpitation ”

“ We next come to a variety which is anything but a harbinger of good, namely, the long stripes or bands of cirrus which stretch outwards from the margin of the cloud canopy of a cyclonic storm. In some ways these appendages to the great nimbus resemble the strips of cirriform cloud which fringe the summit of a thunder-cloud. They look as if they must have been formed by the blowing away, by a rapid wind, of the top of an uprising column of vapour-charged air. ”

“ We first noticed a small cloud gathering about the top of the mountain, which presently commenced circling around the peak, occasionally reaching over far enough to drop down upon us a few sprinkles of water, although the sun was shining brightly where we were. As the cloud continued to circle, it increased in size, momentum, and density of color, spreading out like a huge umbrella. Soon thunder could be heard, growing louder and more frequent until it became one continuous roar, fairly shaking the earth. ”

“ The big drops sift through the pine-needles, plash and patter on the granite pavements, and pour down the sides of ridges and domes in a network of gray, bubbling rills. In a few minutes the cloud withers to a mesh of dim filaments and disappears, leaving the sky perfectly clear and bright, every dust-particle wiped and washed out of it. Everything is refreshed and invigorated, a steam of fragrance rises, and the storm is finished—one cloud, one lightning-stroke, and one dash of rain. This is the Sierra mid-summer thunder-storm reduced to its lowest terms. ”

“ When a moist wind blows in clear weather over a cold summit, it has not time to get chilled as it approaches the rock, and therefore the air remains clear, and the sky bright on the windward side; but under the lee of the peak, there is partly a back eddy, and partly still air; and in that lull and eddy the wind gets time to be chilled by the rock, and the cloud appears, as a boiling mass of white vapor, rising continually with the return current to the upper edge of the mountain, where it is caught by the straight wind and partly torn, partly melted away in broken fragments. ”

“ All storms of desert hills, except wind storms, are impotent. East and east of the Sierras they rise in nearly parallel ranges, desertward, and no rain breaks over them, except from some far-strayed cloud or roving wind from the California Gulf, and these only in winter. In summer the sky travails with thunderings and the flare of sheet lightnings to win a few blistering big drops, and once in a lifetime the chance of a torrent. But you have not known what force resides in the mindless things until you have known a desert wind. ”

“ You see that no mistake is possible here about what is good weather and what bad, or which is cloud and which is sky; but I show you this sketch especially to give you the scale of heights for such clouds in the atmosphere. These thunder cumuli entirely hide the higher Alps. It does not, however, follow that they have buried them, for most of their own aspect of height is owing to the approach of their nearer masses; but at all events, you have cumulus there rising from its base, at about three thousand feet above the plain, to a good ten thousand in the air. ”

“ And then the clouds gathered, blotting out the vision of the sky, the thunder and lightning wove a garment round the world; all over the earth was such a downpour of rain as men had never before seen, and where the volcanoes flared red against the cloud canopy there descended torrents of mud. ”

“ White cirri, in reality parallel, but by perspective radiating, catch the sunshine above, at a height of from fifteen to twenty thousand feet; but the storm on the mountains gathers itself into a full mile's depth of massy cloud, every fold of it involved with thunder, but every form of it, every action, every color, magnificent:—doing its mighty work in its own hour and its own dominion, nor snatching from you for an instant, nor defiling with a stain, the abiding blue of the transcendent sky, or the fretted silver of its passionless clouds. ”

“ Now the storm is over, the sky is clear, the last rolling thunder-wave is spent on the peaks, and where are the raindrops now—what has become of all the shining throng? In winged vapor rising some are already hastening back to the sky, some have gone into the plants, creeping through invisible doors into the round rooms of cells, some are locked in crystals of ice, some in rock crystals, some in porous moraines to keep their small springs flowing, some have gone journeying on in the rivers to join the larger raindrop of the ocean. ”

“ The firmament between the clouds faded from a blood-red through orange and daffodil into an exquisite green, which spread like a sea of glory through which those magnificent argosies slowly sailed. Some of the clouds were drawn in straight chords across the arch of heaven, these being doubtless the sections of layers of cloud whose horizontal dimensions were hidden from us. The cumuli around and near the sun himself could not be gazed upon, until, as the day declined, they gradually lost their effulgence and became tolerable to the eyes. ”

“ A cloud less deeply shaded, but still deep enough, when viewed with the naked eye, to appear dark on a bright ground, is suddenly changed to a white cloud on a dark ground by the quenching of the light behind it. When a reddish cloud at sunset chances to float in the region of maximum polarisation, the quenching of the surrounding light causes it to flash with a brighter crimson. Last Easter eve the Dartmoor sky, which had just been cleansed by a snow-storm, wore a very wild appearance. Round the horizon it was of steely brilliancy, while reddish cumuli and cirri floated southwards. ”

“ Heralded by the increasing fierceness of the squalls, sometimes by a faint flash of lightning like the signal of a lighted torch waved far away behind the clouds, the shift of wind comes at last, the crucial moment of the change from the brooding and veiled violence of the south-west gale to the sparkling, flashing, cutting, cleareyed anger of the King's north-westerly mood. ”

“ I have myself, in many of the passages of 'Modern Painters' before referred to, conceived of cloud too narrowly as always produced by cold, whereas the temperature of a cloud must continually, like that of our visible breath in frosty weather, or of the visible current of steam, or the smoking of a warm lake surface under sudden frost, be above that of the surrounding atmosphere; and yet I never remember entering a cloud without being chilled by it, and the darkness of the plague-wind, unless in electric states of the air, is always accompanied by deadly chill. ”

“ On what anvils and wheels is the vapor pointed, twisted, hammered, whirled, as the potter's clay? By what hands is the incense of the sea built up into domes of marble?"
[9] The opposed conditions of the higher and lower orders of cloud, with the balanced intermediate one, are beautifully seen on mountain summits of rock or earth. On snowy ones [37] they are far more complex: but on rock summits there are three distinct forms of attached cloud in serene weather ”

“ It is a sort of steady, persistent, overwhelming, endlessly driving downpour, which makes your heart sick, and opens it to dismal forebodings. And the stormy mood of the Easterly weather looms black upon the sky with a peculiar and amazing blackness. The West Wind hangs heavy gray curtains of mist and spray before your gaze, but the Eastern interloper of the narrow seas, when he has mustered his courage and cruelty to the point of a gale, puts your eyes out, puts them out completely, makes you feel blind for life upon a lee-shore. It is the wind, also, that brings snow. ”

“ Lightning flashes all around us; as the wind whirls from north-east to south-west, rain and snow-flakes become hail, half the size of peas. Thunder roars and echoes through the mountains; the mules hang their heads, and travel slowly; the thinly-clad aboriginal walks shivering as he drives the train ahead; the dark cumulus cloud seems to wrap itself around us. ”

“ The weather has been constantly broken by storms, the finest and most terrific I ever witnessed. Last night, during two hours, the thunder, repeated by its echoes, rolled without a pause, and the Jura was constantly illuminated with the lightnings, sheeted, forked, or like circles of fire, which, blazing above the heads of the mountain range, made it resemble a line of volcanoes. ”

“ I have defined the floating or sky cloud, and defined the falling, or earth cloud. But there's a sort of thing between the two, which needs a third definition: namely, Mist. In the 22d page of his 'Glaciers of [10] the Alps,' Professor Tyndall says that "the marvelous blueness of the sky in the earlier part of the day indicated that the air was charged, almost to saturation, with transparent aqueous vapor." Well, in certain weather that is true. You all know the peculiar clearness which precedes rain,—when the distant hills are looking nigh. ”

“ A light grey cloud appears in the distance, and as it approaches you, it sends forth lightnings, accompanied with hurried bursts of thunder. A furious storm of hail or snow immediately follows. The howl of the tempest rises to a yell, and the squall, as it sweeps along in its fury, cuts off the tops of the waves, and scatters them in foam over the surface of the deep like a mantle of snow. ”

“ After twenty years Argus water rose in the wash against the frail houses, and the piled snows of Kearsarge slid down at a thunder peal over the cabins and the camp, but you could conceive that it was the fault of neither the water nor the snow.
The first effect of cloud study is a sense of presence and intention in storm processes.
Weather does not happen. It is the visible manifestation of the Spirit moving itself in the void. It gathers itself together under the heavens ”

“ North-westerly gusts of wind raised clouds of dust, and drove it in eddying drifts across the plain, till a thunderstorm with a smart fall of rain cleared the atmosphere, and allowed the sun to shine out a while before setting for the day. ”

“ In the course of the afternoon the wind from north-west increased to a gale, but the air was still warm, and the sun set in a clear sky, while the heavy clouds sank to the eastern horizon where sheet lightning played incessantly until after midnight. The air brought by that wind from the north-west was so dry as to occasion a most unpleasant heat and parched sensation in the skin of the face and hands, and several men complained of headache. ”

“ Presently the storm broke forth into full snowy bloom, and the thronging crystals darkened the air. The wind swept past in hissing floods, grinding the snow into meal and sweeping down into the hollows in enormous drifts all the heavier particles, while the finer dust was sifted through the sky, increasing the icy gloom. ”

“ The southeast wind causes a mass of air, equal to the diameter of the mountain, suddenly to ascend at least three thousand feet; the dilatation produced by altitude, with its attendant cold, causes the immediate formation of a cloud on the summit; the water in the atmosphere becomes visible; successive masses of gliding-up and passing-over air cause the continual formation of clouds, but the top of the vapory mass, or "table-cloth", is level, and seemingly motionless ”

“ Soon, however, the heavy masses of clouds in the northeast, that drove wildly before every ice-winged impulse of the storm-king, overwhelmed and shrouded the silver disc from sight, and gave forth the tempest they had so long threatened. Still, now and then, as the wrathful clouds would separate for a moment, a faint lustre would dart forth, sprinkling, as with the purple glories of the orient morn, the torn and ragged opening, and illuminating the landscape with a quaint beauty—half light and half shadow—then all would become dark again. ”