Most of the time, these eddies are relatively mild affairs compared to the tempests of the West Face, but they still make for peculiar effects, as the Italians in 1934 witnessed and recorded. Most notable were the cloud formations: long barrels of white cumulus that revolved slowly like enormous breakers at a beach; or strange cap-like clouds that stacked upon themselves like the roofs of Chinese temples, first one stack, then another, diminishing as they extended to the horizon; or clouds that curled in intricate filigree and spirals, like some infinitely expanding Mandelbrot set in the sky.
Meteorologists have names for these various formations: wave clouds, lenticular clouds, rotors, cirrus Kelvin-Helmhotz clouds are just a few. They take shape in the air currents swirling downwind from mountains, but—as ever—in the lee of the Wheel these effects are far greater than anywhere else in the world.
Adding to the weirdness of it, for the Italians, was the fact that from noon onwards, the vast pyramid shadow of the Wheel itself would begin to creep across the ocean, casting the middle airs into shade even though all above was sunlight and blueness. The clouds in those middle airs were thus forever dancing between light and dark, blazing bright and then fading again as they rose or fell or moved east, until late afternoon, when the Wheel’s shadow seemed to engulf the whole world, and the eastward view became a netherworld place of grey mists, while far overhead the sky burned red with sunset.
But on the day of the final disaster the Italians were to witness something quite beyond all these ordinary wonders. The cause of it cannot be known for certain, but from the description it would seem that the jet stream was again in play. Most likely the Polar Jet was hitting the West Face, and at such an angle as to ensure that the gale was diverted upwards over the left and right shoulders of the Wheel. This would create roaring, rising torrents of air at either shoulder, which in turn would create a vast zone of turbulence between the shoulders, i.e. all across the East Face. And as it was summer, this turbulence would have drawn warm moist air from sea level high into the cold altitudes, creating clouds and precipitation.
But ignorant of such upper atmospheric mechanics (a field still in its infancy in 1934) what the Italians saw was this: on what had otherwise been a calm and warm day, abruptly, early in the afternoon, titanic thunderheads began to form to their left and right. Accompanying this was a far-off high-pitched noise, as of some vast machine whirring at incredible speed. Had it been twenty years later, they may well have compared the sound to a mighty jet engine roaring high on the mountain.
Impressed by the spectacle, but not particularly alarmed, the Italians continued with the day’s work. Two of the climbers were near five thousand metres, pushing upwards, with two more in support a thousand metres below. The other four members of the team were resting at Base Camp, two thousand metres lower still.
But as evening approached the storms on either side grew unabated, until they were super-cell size, black burgeoning monsters, each swollen so hugely that between them now a gap of only a few kilometres remained, through which the climbers could still look east to a darkening horizon. Thunder rumbled continually as lightning brooded and flickered within the depths of the great thunderheads.
Then lightning started sizzling between the thunderheads, running horizontally from one cloud to the other, cutting directly in front of the astonished Italians. Indeed, because the centre of the East Face was out-thrust between the two storms, the great dazzling bolts were passing only dozens of metres away from the cliffs to which the climbers clung. By rights the lightning should surely have been grounding in the mountain itself, but it went only from storm to storm, as if each thundercloud was the electrical opposite to the other, and irresistible.
Thunder battered the face with deafening cracks, shaking rocks loose in perilous falls. The four high climbers had by this point retreated to their tents, one camp at four thousand eight hundred metres, the other at four thousand. But these offered dubious shelter. As the gap between the storms narrowed further, gusts of winds began to buffet them. At first it was only random blasts of air that blew this way or that, savagely plucking at the tents. But then a more sustained gale settled. For the two climbers in the higher camp, the wind was blowing down the face. But for the two climbers in the lower camp, it was blowing upwards.
And finally, the crowning strangeness. From the edge of each thunderhead a sinister protrusion began to extend towards the storm opposite: a twisting, seething tube of rapidly spinning cloud, fringed with white spray. As the climbers above and below watched in amazement, these two extrusions joined into one, and so formed, writhing between the thunderheads, an impossible thing: a horizontal tornado.
For what followed, we have only the testimony of the climbers at the higher camp. From their point of view, the tornado was below them. It now drew closer to the face, twisting sinuously and whistling demonically all the while, and began to slowly descend, its outer edge rubbing directly against the mountainside as it went, kicking up snow and stones in a fury. Said one of the two climbers later, it was like watching an enormous rotating scrubbing brush running down the face and sweeping it clean.
An apt description, for as it went, the tornado swept the two climbers in the lower camp clear off the mountain. The next day the shredded ruins of their tent, still holding their mangled remains within, would be located floating sadly in the sea.
For the moment, however, all the climbers above knew was that the tornado raged unfettered until at last the two storms, swollen into the stratosphere by now and sending enormous shrouds east across the heavens, grew fat enough to swallow the vortex and join together as one. The East Face was then engulfed in darkness, rain and hail.
The two surviving climbers clung on through a miserable night. And even when the storm faded and dawn at last came, they still faced a perilous descent, for the storm had blown away all intermediate camps and fixed lines. Indeed, if not for the other four climbers at Base Camp, who ascended quickly to help, the two might indeed have perished.
But in any case, once everyone was safely down, and the two dead bodies recovered, there was no question of beginning the campaign all over again. The six survivors packed up their gear, radioed for their ship and retreated in mourning.
And to this day, the two dead climbers remain the only fatalities ever recorded of a tornado that came at its victims sideways.
▲
The final of these three tales of wind and weirdness upon the Wheel does not in fact take place upon the mountain itself, but rather upon its accompanying lesser peak, Observatory Mount—the Child of the Wheel, as it is sometimes called. But if Observatory Mount is indeed the Wheel’s offspring, then, as the following account will demonstrate, the larger mountain is a punishing parent.
Observatory Mount was first climbed in 1895. Although sheer sided and impressive to behold, it has never been considered worse than a moderate ascent for experienced mountaineers. By 1950, the year in which this event took place, it had been climbed dozens of times. Indeed, the island from which the Mount rises had been permanently inhabited since the early 1900s, when a lighthouse and keepers’ huts were constructed at what is now the port and township of Base. And even before then, whaling stations had provided a seasonal population.
Still, in 1950, there were as yet no permanent structures on the Mount’s summit. This was about to change, however, and the driving force was the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Planners at the Bureau had decided that it was time to install a manned weather station atop the Mount, for they had begun to appreciate just how unique the Wheel and its environs were in meteorological terms, but were limited in their understanding by the poor data currently being collected there.
A construction team was assigned and arrived on Theodolite Isle in December. It consisted of thirty men. Half of them were climbers, to get the team to the top of the Mount, the rest were carpenters and weather specialists, to build the actual station.
A month was spent in fixing a route up the Mount, c
omplete with steel guide lines and ladders and stairways, so that even a novice climber could ascend without difficulty. A further two month’s work saw a large accommodation hut and a smaller weather hut nearing completion on the summit. (For historians, the larger hut was placed roughly where the
Terrace Pool of Walter Richman’s residence would later be sited, while the weather hut, and the recording instruments, were positioned higher up on the knob that Richman’s Cottage would subsequently occupy.)
Both structures were built only of timber, but as stoutly as possible, and with hipped roofs to withstand gales, for extreme winds across the summit had already been reported by earlier climbers. Similarly designed huts had been used in Australia’s Antarctic territory, at Mawson’s camp at Cape Denison, for instance, the buildings of which by then had lasted several decades against temperatures of minus forty degrees Celsius and gales up to three hundred kilometres per hour.
But, with the project all but complete, several days of squally weather, atypical for late summer, descended, during which strong winds battered the Mount, rendering the ascent dangerous. Work was postponed, and everyone except for three men retreated from the summit. The remaining three bunkered down in the accommodation hut to see out the storm and keep any damage in check. They had supplies enough and plenty of oil for heating, so did not feel themselves in any great danger.
On the fourth night of the unsettled weather, however, the Polar Jet swung out of the south, hit the higher ramparts of the Wheel, and came ravaging down upon the Mount in full force.
Not that the men on the summit knew that this was what was happening. In 1950, jet streams were not yet fully understood, and the interaction between them and the Wheel even less so. All they knew for certain was that the blustery conditions worsened abruptly in the darkness from an inconvenience to something more terrifying than any of them had ever known.
Senior carpenter Raymond Jones, of Launceston, Tasmania, was one of the three, and later recorded an oral account of the event.
It’d been windy up until then, sure enough, but that shack had kept us snug and warm all through, no worries. We were all asleep when things turned bad, about two a.m. The first I knew of it I thought it must be an earthquake, the hut was slamming back and forth like the ground under it was shaking. But then I got my head around the incredible noise from outside—not an earthquake, it was the wind, roaring away like a tidal wave collapsing or something.
We all piled out of bed, amazed at how much the shack was groaning and shuddering with every gust. Up until then, even the strongest blow hadn’t bothered it—we built that thing solid—but now it was flexing like those oak posts were just pine sticks. God knows what the wind strength was. Charlie wanted to go up to the weather shack and look at the anemometer—we’d installed it only a week before—but I put paid to that. No one was going outside, no one was even going to try to open the door, even though it was on the lee side. It sounded goddamn terrible out there.
We waited and it got worse and worse. I’ve never heard anything like that awful wind. It scaled up from a roar to a banshee scream to a … well, I know people always use freight trains when they talk about winds in hurricanes and the like, and they’re right, but it’s not just any freight train. Imagine the biggest, nastiest diesel engine you ever thought of, out of control and running wild down a hill at a hundred miles an hour, screaming straight at you, and the driver has got the air horn blasting as loud as it can go, and you’re just standing on the rails only an instant from getting hit—that’s what the sound is like, not just loud, but evil and metallic somehow, like iron screaming, and it’s terrifying because you could swear you’re going be killed right now, and then right now, and then right now …
Anyway, after maybe an hour we knew the shack wasn’t going to last, the roof was jittering all around and the joists were cracking. We would’ve been goners if we’d been in there when it went. But of course we had a last resort we could use. It was a natural feature in the summit, a cavity in the rock that was just nicely shaped to form a kind of basement. We’d built the shack right over it, even snugged the shack down into the hole a little for security, and then built a trapdoor into the floor. So we dropped down there now. It was a pretty rough and ready space down there, just naked stone, it was only ever meant for storage, but it would give us shelter if the shack above went.
And went it did! We’d only been down there ten minutes when the freight train up above turned into ten freight trains, all with demon opera singers on board, shrieking at the top of their lungs—and with a crash the whole hut ripped away above us, roof, walls, even half the floor. Some of the stuff in the cellar went flying up too, and we might have gone with it, if we hadn’t been under the part of the floor that held. Also, we had jammed ourselves into the narrowest part of the cavity, a crevice really, at that end of the basement.
So now there it was, the night and the wind right above us, all open. If you can imagine what it would be like looking into the mouth of some black howling hell just a foot or two over your head, then you might get an idea of it. Charlie and Mike, they were deeper into the crevice than me, under an overhang—we were all squeezed in as tight as we could go—so it was really only me who could see up into the throat of it.
Christ I was scared. I could feel myself being sucked upwards all the time, not by the wind exactly, but by some kind of weird vacuum effect—my ears were popping like crazy from the low pressure.
I would’ve gone too, if it hadn’t been for Charlie and Mike hanging on to my belt for dear life. I had bruises around my gut for weeks afterwards, and back in the crevice the other two got so battered about against the rock walls that they ended up all bloody. And though we were all shouting and screaming at each other the whole time, I don’t remember hearing a single world. In amongst all that insane din, it was as if we’d all gone deaf and dumb at the same time.
It felt like we held on for years like that, but when the blackness above began to turn grey we knew that dawn was coming and that it’d actually only been about three hours. And thank god the wind began to ease off about then too. It was like … it was like a wind that bad needed darkness to blow, and that it was being driven away by day. I dunno, but either way, by full light it was over. Things were still windy, but the great bloody freight train was gone.
We climbed up, all of us in shock and still not hearing quite right, to see what we might see. There wasn’t a trace left of the two huts, other than the holes we’d drilled as foundations—no other sign that anything had ever been there. The whole summit was swept clean, even the rock looked like it had been sandblasted to bleeding. But maybe not. I was a bit shook up, and nothing looked right to me really.
Anyway, there we sat, all trembling and dazed and terrified that any minute the wind might come back, and there we were still when the other blokes climbed up from below to rescue us. The wind hadn’t hit down there, but they’d heard the dreadful din coming from the summit all night, so they came up first thing.
Never been so glad to see other faces.
Other than the superficial injuries mentioned, the three men survived without any lasting harm, but as noted in the account the weather station had been obliterated. It was another two years before a second station was built, and this time the huts were bunkers, fashioned of reinforced concrete and excavated into the solid rock for further protection. This second station stood for the next fifty years, withstanding several similar windstorms in that time, and recording the world record wind gust along the way.
It was only when Walter Richman began the construction of his residence atop the peak that the old bunkers were finally demolished—the steel guide lines and ladders and stairways removed to prevent anyone climbing the mount ever again, and the crevice in which Ray Jones and his two companions had sheltered from the demon gale enlarged fifty times over to form a swimming pool.
10
ON THE BRINK
In search of their cup of tea, Rita and Clar
a climbed without talking from the Museum up to the Entrance Hall. When they reached the top of the stairs, however, they found they were not alone—voices were echoing and a mass of feet tramping. The two women had to stand back a moment as a group of about a dozen men clad in overalls and black T-shirts trooped by towards the foyer at the Hall’s furthest end. The men were all heavily loaded with bags and boxes, or pushing large silver crates along on trolleys, the crates bearing the logo ‘Skyfire Pyrotechnics.’
At their rear came the house manager, Bradley, as well as Eugene and Kennedy, the latter with one ear to a walkie-talkie as he strode along.
‘Everything all right?’ Clara enquired.
The security chief rolled an eye minimally. ‘Log jam getting everyone down to Base. This is the second load of the fireworks boys—the first lot went down in the service lift no trouble, and the lift came back up fine, but now there’s a glitch, something or other is out of alignment, so the engineers down at Base are holding the elevator up here while they check the telemetry. It’s taking forever, so meanwhile I’m sending this lot down in the main lift.’
Clara glanced ironically at Bradley. ‘Don’t the house protocols insist that the main elevator is only for Mr Richman and his guests, and that all staff or visiting workers are to use only the service lift?’
‘They so insist indeed,’ replied the house manager, with an austere look to Kennedy.
‘He already told me,’ growled the security chief. ‘But these guys have a ship waiting in the harbour that’s already overdue; it was supposed to be gone by noon. So fuck the protocols. Bradley can ride down with them if he’s so worried the marble floor might get scuffed, heaven fucking forfend.’
The Rich Man’s House Page 28
