Portents

It was another week of portents. Its atmosphere troubled by sunspots, its crust similarly affected and adjusting itself to isostasy (equilibrium), Earth underwent varied disturbances. At Ridgefield, N. J., the black cone of a cyclone descended upon a lumber factory, swept a big church flat as a card house, ripped through houses, garages. It flooded streets, visited three neighboring towns in its line, then rushed out over the Atlantic. The same evening-- On Long Island, along the south shore, the populace marveled at huge bars of blue and yellow light rocketing through the sky--a violent freak electric storm. A little later-- At Sea Cliff, on the north shore, grey Long Island Sound suddenly delivered out of its flat bosom a towering column of water that raced ashore with terrific impact, spinning up trees by their roots, cottages by their foundations, dragging wreckage into the Sound on its backwash. (Cyclones and waterspouts [which are cyclones over water] are caused by air rushing to fill an area of low pressure, being diverted into an inward spiral motion by the spin of the earth. The spiral is always counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere, clockwise in the southern. The "path" of a cyclone is determined by the larger air currents in which the spiral motion occurs, as an eddy is carried down a brook.) In England, townsfolk living north and west of London scrambled from their beds before dawn, panic-stricken by sounds of falling crockery and chimney pots. Through the lanes of Duddleston fled a yokel in a nightshirt screaming, "The end of the world has come!" In Hereford, the town clock struck thrice though it was really five o'clock. At Stratford-on-Avon, U. S. tourists clutched their passports and pocketbooks; the "sure and firm set earth" was trembling violently with the roar of an express train. It was Britain's third temblor in a month, the severest in 30 years, part of a series indicating that for the first time in history Britain was in an active earthquake zone. Vesuvius. Home bodies whose relatives were touring Italy grew needlessly uneasy over headlines in U. S. newspapers: "Vesuvius Again in Eruption . . . Vesuvius Spurts Lava." It was but a minor disturbance in the central crater, indistinguishable by day from below, a cause of no alarm to the government volcano laboratory. Few days pass without some sign of life from Vesuvius, usually a thin column of smoke. Small upheavals of rock and lava do not overflow outside the old crater, which was formed by the last eruption of violence, in 1906. History knows of but two truly cataclysmic eruptions of Vesuvius--in 79 A. D. (reported by Historian Pliny); in 1631, when 18,000 lost their lives and ash fell in Constantinople (about 700 miles away). In Bering Sea, a Japanese steamer stood by to behold a long, heavy eruption of Bogoslof, a volcanic island near the eastern end of the Aleutian chain, evidently a continuance of the terrestrial colly wobbles suffered by that region during the past year, in which Mount McKinley, far inland in Alaska, has several times been reported as participating.