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Sometimes, indeed, these winds were kindly, life-sustaining, forgiving. One of the oldest extant references to wind in human literature is in the ancient Sanskrit poem Rigveda:

May the wind blow healing hither

Kind, refreshing to us in the heart,

May it extend our lives

Wind, you are to us a father

And a brother and our friend

So equip us for life

And if Wind, there in your house

A store of immortality is laid,

Give some to us, that we may live9

And sometimes winds were like moody friends, occasionally rude but often charming. Sailors are unusually forgiving about their friends the winds, because at sea there "are no permanently ill winds. They are made for travel: one to take you away and, because no wind stays the same, another eventually to bring you back." Guy de Maupassant put a sailor's view very well in his essay Sur I'eau in 1888: "What a character the wind is . . . An all powerful ruler, sometimes terrible, sometime charitable . . . We know him better than our fathers and our mothers, this terrible, invisible, changeable, cunning, treacherous, ferocious person. We love him and we fear him, we know his tricks and his rages . . . He is the master of the sea, he who can be used, avoided or fled from, but who can never be tamed."10

If the winds were violent, they must be the work of some capricious god, quick to anger, a god who takes transgressions personally. As Joseph Conrad put it in Typhoon, violent winds can be like "the sudden smashing of a vial of wrath. It seems to explode all around the ship with an overpowering concussion and a rush of great waters, as if an immense dam had been blown up to windward. In an instant the men lost touch of each other. This is the disintegrating power of a great wind: it isolates one from one's kind. A furious gale attacks him like a personal enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind, seeks to rout his very spirit out of him." And again: "The gale's howls and shrieks seemed to take on . . . something of the human character, or human rage and pain."11 "I was dreadfully frighted!" said Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Homer has Odysseus reacting to Zeus's wrath: "The whole ship reeled from the blow of his bolt and was filled with the smell of sulfur. My men were flung overboard and round the black hull they floated like seagulls on the waves. There was no homecoming for them, the god saw to that."12

Shakespeare, as usual, has a trenchant word or two on the subject, and not just in The Tempest. Violent storms form the backdrop to three of his greatest tragedies: Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and King Lear. "Thunder disrupts the skies; shrieks of owls, laments and prophecies pierce the night air. The raging wind threatens to destroy the rooftops and, 'Some say, the earth, Was fevrous and did shake,' as Macbeth descends, dagger in hand, upon the sleeping Duncan."13

Certain local winds, like the meltemi that rules the Greek summers, are based on larger patterns. The meltemi is dependent on the monsoons that center on Pakistan in conjunction with the steady high pressure ridge over the Balkans. Winds like this are predictable in their patterns. "Aristotle, for example, said it arrived after the summer solstice on June 21. Once the meltemi blows a watch may be set by its rhythms. Stirring at ten in the morning, blowing hard around two, dying at six and calm by eight."14

Sirocco is the general name in the Mediterranean for the desert winds that blow from all across north Africa: "the leveche of southern Spain, the chili in Algeria, and the ghibli of Tunisia and Libya. In Egypt and the Levant the local name is khamsin, meaning 50 in Arabic, for the 50-day period the wind tends to blow. In Andalusia the south wind will parch a wheat field before it ripens, making the grain fall to the ground during harvest . . . but it is further north, after the sirocco has picked up Mediterranean sea moisture, that it becomes most noxious. The air takes on what Thomas