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By Root 340 0

on the sand by a passing traveler turn opaque from the sandblasting in a day or two; in a month it too was dust and moved with the wind, dancing in little leaps, to disappear into the dunes. Wind is the most potent of all erosional agents, trumping even water. It carries away somewhere between 200 million and a billion tons of topsoil and sand from the Sahara and Sahel every year, most of it dumped at sea but some ending up in Europe or even North America. In the desiccated air of the Sahara, wind-blown abrasive sand beats on metal with a sound like heavy rain. It can rattle against legs and arms and face like hail, causing abrasions and drawing blood.

Owen Watkins, a surgeon traveling with Kitchener's army toward Khartoum, once saw a train engulfed by such a sandstorm. Maybe not quite as violent as the Wreckhouse winds of Newfoundland, but in his book With Kitchener's Army, he described it as "quite the most grandly awful sight, a great bank of dust about 100 feet high, stretching for miles and miles in front of us and rushing upon us with a dull roar . . . The [invalid convoy] train we had seen start had to pull back into the station, and another train a few miles out into the desert had to stop, being nearly swept off the line by the force of the wind. After that experience I find it easy to believe the stories, often read before in skeptical spirit, of whole caravans being lost and buried in the desert."

One such story, recounted with commentary by Herodotus in his Persian Wars, written about 450 B.C., told how Cambyses, the conqueror of Egypt in 525 B.C., dispatched an army to quell the stubbornly oppositionist Ammonites, keepers of the oracle at Jupiter Ammon, at Siwa in the Qattara Depression in the Egyptian Western Desert. "The men sent to attack the Ammonians, started from Thebes, having guides with them, and may be clearly traced as far as the [Kharga Oasis], seven days journey across the sand. Thenceforth nothing is to be heard of them, except what the Ammonians report, that the Persians set forth from the Oasis across the sand, and had reached about half way when, as they were in camp breaking their fast, a strong and violent south wind arose, bringing with it vast columns of swirling sand, which covered up the troops and caused them to disappear. Thus, according to the Ammonians, was the fate of this army." Forty thousand men, with their panoply and pay chests, with their animals and their food stores, with their armor and weaponry, with their commissary and their water skins, perished in the sand, their skeletons polished and preserved, perhaps, but never found.5

At sea the gales are terrifying even to experienced sailors; in the stormy winter of 2002 to 2003, a container ship, a vessel fully seven hundred feet long, limped into port at Halifax, wreckage still hanging over its gunwales; it had been caught in an Atlantic gale and had fifty containers torn from its deck and dashed into the sea.

Winds heap up the water into massive waves. Oceanographers say that it is possible—at least in theory—for waves of 220 feet to be generated in the deep ocean, about the height of a twenty-story building. That no one has ever reported such a wave doesn't mean they haven't occasionally occurred; after all, hundreds of thousands of ships have vanished since men began venturing onto the sea, five thousand or so years ago. Slightly smaller but still gigantic waves, however, are encountered too often for comfort. Hurricane Ivan itself churned up huge waves as it passed through the Gulf of Mexico, reaching as high as forty meters, or 131 feet, something that was explained in a paper by Peter Bowyer and Allan MacAfee published in June 2005 in the Journal of the American Meteorological Society. Ten years earlier, in September 1995, the luxury liner Queen Elizabeth 2 was on route from Cherbourg to New York, and had to change course to avoid Hurricane Luis. Nevertheless, the vessel encountered a series of seas 60 feet tall, with occasional taller crests. At four in the morning—mercifully after even the most persistent revelers