Symi Wind
The wind we had on Symi on Monday didn’t start off on Symi. It started off somewhere south and judging from the state of the courtyard and roof, it started off in the Sahara or other desert down that way. We had a fall of what’s known locally as red rain. The rain brings with it the dust from the upper atmosphere (or something), and that dust starts off in North Africa as a desert. So, yesterday, I was able to go to the beach without leaving the courtyard. I’ve put a few shots up today so you can see what I’m talking about, but it looks darker in real life.
Along with the wind came a ‘Dyatlov Pass Incident’ kind of sound effect. What on earth is he talking about? You may well ask. Well, fifty-nine years ago last month, a group of experienced (and mainly qualified) Russian mountaineers set off to train in the area of the Dyatlov Pass (named after the group leader) in the northern Ural Mountains. On the night of February 1st / 2nd, something strange took place, and all the hikers were later found dead under very mysterious circumstances. They’d fled their tent half-dressed and were later found dead in all kinds of strange places and positions. There was specialisation that this was due to aliens, the military, group hysteria, drugs, a yeti, you name it. But…
One of the theories put forward in a book I read, ‘Dead Mountain’, suggests that it was a natural meteorological phenomenon that caused group panic and led to the students running barefoot and half-dressed into the snow and freezing wind. I can’t remember all the details, and they are very technical, but as I remember it, when the wind blows in a certain way it causes a very low vibration in the atmosphere that not only sounds creepy (although the main effects of it comes from sub-audible waves, if that’s the right expression) but that also causes nausea and severe brain function disruption. Just to add to my list of rarely used words, this phenomenon is called Infrasonic Intrusion, and that’s what it sounded like we had going on at our house on Monday night. Every time a strong gust came past, something upstairs and outside rattled with a low vibration that had us glancing across the room at each other. I had an idea what it was…
So, on Tuesday morning, I popped up to the roof to take a look, and a couple of photos as you will see, and I found the cause of this strange noise, which we had noticed before. On the roof of the ‘tower’ above the kitchen, our landlord has stored two totally unusable, rusty 1960s sun-bed frames that are, like many other things around here, tied down with electrical cable. What he intends to do with them is anyone’s guess, but he does like to collect useful things like un-useful old sunbeds. They had come away from their moorings and instead of being neatly shoved into the cover, were halfway across the roof. I reckon that each time a gust came, they vibrated across the flat roof producing the eerie sound that vibrated through the house below. I’ve not retied them with handy pieces of wire and flex and will wait and see if that has solved the problem next time we have such a Symi wind blowing this way again.
