Page:Physical Geography of the Sea and its Meteorology.djvu/174

 148 the earth in this region, strewed with impalpable and feather-light remains of animal and vegetable organisms, is swept over by whirlwinds, gales, and tornadoes of terrific force: this is the period for the general atmospheric disturbances which have made characteristic the equinoxes. Do not these conditions appear sufficient to afford the "rain dust" for the spring showers? At the period of the autumnal equinox, another portion of the Amazonian basin is parched with drought, and liable to winds that fill the air with dust, and with the remains of dead animal and vegetable matter: these impalpable organisms, which each rainy season calls into being, to perish the succeeding season of drought, are perhaps distended and made even lighter by the gases of decomposition which has been going on in the period of drought. May not, therefore, the whirlwinds which accompany the vernal equinox, and sweep over the lifeless plains of the Lower Orinoco, take up the "rain dust" which descends in the northern hemisphere in April and May and may it not be the atmospherical disturbances which accompany the autumnal equinox that take up the microscopic organisms from the Upper Orinoco and the great Amazonian basin for the showers of October?

326. Humboldt's description of the dust-whirlwinds of the Orinoco.—The Baron von Humboldt, in his Aspects of Nature, thus contrasts the wet and the dry seasons there: "When, under the vertical rays of the never-clouded sun, the carbonized turfy covering falls into dust, the indurated soil cracks asunder as if from the shock of an earthquake. If at such times two opposing currents of air, whose conflict produces a rotary motion, come in contact with the soil, the plain assumes a strange and singular aspect. Like conical-shaped clouds, the points of which descend to the earth, the sand rises through the rarefied air on the electrically-charged centre of the whirling current, resembling the loud water-spout, dreaded by the experienced mariner. The lowering sky sheds a dim, almost straw-coloured light on. the desolate plain. The horizon draws suddenly nearer, the steppe seems to contract, and with it the heart of the wanderer. The hot, dusty particles which fill the air increase its suffocating heat, and the east wind, blowing over the long-heated soil, brings with it no refreshment, but rather a still more burning glow. The pools which the yellow, fading branches of the palm had protected from evaporation, now gradually disappear. As in the icy north