Portents

Jutting out in the Atlantic about a third of the way from Lisbon to Philadelphia, are the Azores Islands. Chief of them is Fayal, where the little stone houses of Horta--toy houses of pure pink, blue, yellow and white--rim the smooth-curved harbor. . . . One day last week the volcanic crust of the earth subsided under Fayal. Some 1,500 of the little stone houses of Horta trembled, crumbled, fell down. A tidal wave washed in to paw their ruins.

Confused despatches put the death toll between 10 and 50. Some 400 were injured. Bubonic plague appeared, killing two. The balance of Horta's 8000 inhabitants moved to the country or set up tents on their tennis courts. "Earthquake love" spread everywhere--the human sympathy and mercy that is always stirred up by great disaster. Portugal, whose possessions the Azores are, rushed portable houses and more tents to the scene. None of the various trans-Atlantic cables for which the Azores are a station were broken.

The earth's crust, uncomfortable in other places, twitched some more. It twitched under Maine for the twelfth time in two years, causing little damage. It twitched in Mexico, terrifying peons in Tehuantepec, who, instead of realizing that a mild earthquake now and then is really a good thing for mankind as it safeguards against catastrophic shocks, moved sullenly toward the hills muttering about the return of Quetzalcoatl, the bird-serpent, and other ancient gods. . . . Also, the earth twitched sharply last week in Greece, in Chile.

Only slightly less ignorant than the peons of Tehuantepec were folk and newspapers that talked about the Equinox in connection with these earthquakes; or with a howling hurricane that last week swept Louisiana, torrential rains that flooded Illinois, Iowa, Missouri; with a tornado in Nebraska and Kansas; with the worst typhoon of years in Japan (100 killed); and other portents of the week. In the first place, it was not yet the Equinox, which comes Sept. 21-25, when the earth reaches a tilt in the heavens such that the plane of its equator passes through the sun, making day and night equal. In the second place, the occurrence on earth of storms at the Equinox is simply a "happenstance." The earth's tilt, the sun's position over earth's equator, have no meteorological implications other than the general one that toward the end of the summer the continents begin to cool off while the sea stays warm, thus altering some air currents. Storms in September are erroneously called "equinoctial gales" if the term is taken to designate anything but an ordinary weather disturbance named for convenience, as who should say "a Christmas blizzard." Records taken over 50 years actually show fewer storms between Sept. 21 and 25 than during the five-day periods immediately before and after those dates.