“All through the forenoon the barometer continued to fall. The sky remained clear until a little past noon, and the wind blew gently from the northeast as before. Suddenly we saw a white cloud rolling up from the northeast and spreading over the heavens until they were completely covered. Masses of dust came with the wind, which increased in force for a time and then lulled a little.
“Suddenly the wind went around to the south and blew a gale, yes, a hurricane. It started off at about thirty miles an hour, but before it ended its visit it was blowing fully seventy miles an hour, at least that is what the papers said next day. I am told it sometimes reaches a velocity of one hundred miles an hour, and has even been known to exceed one hundred and forty miles. These tremendous winds do a great deal of damage. They drive ships ashore or overwhelm them at sea; they devastate fields and forests and level a great many buildings.
“The barometer fell rapidly in the forenoon, as I have mentioned; it was the thermometer’s turn in the afternoon. The mercury stood at about ninety degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of the forenoon, and it remained so until the wind chopped around to the south. An hour after the change of wind it stood at seventy degrees, and an hour later at fifty. I am told that it sometimes drops thirty degrees in half an hour, but such occurrences are unusual.
“This is a good place to say that sudden changes in the temperature are very common in Australia, and that the change from midday to midnight is far greater than any to which we are accustomed in the United States. When we have a change of twenty or thirty degrees in a single day we regard it as unusual. What would you say to one hundred and ten degrees at noon and fifty degrees at midnight? This is quite common in the interior of Australia and not at all infrequent on the coast.
“The thermometer runs very high in this country, and it is not at all rare for it to indicate one hundred and twenty-five or one hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit. One traveler has a record of one hundred and thirty-nine degrees in the shade and one hundred and seventy-two in the sun. I am told that in South Melbourne the thermometer once made an official record of one hundred and eleven degrees in the shade and one hundred and seventy-nine degrees in the sun.
“So great is the heat of the sun at midday that travelers generally try to avoid it if they can do so. It is the plan of most people who travel on horseback, in wagons, or on foot, to start before daylight, and keep going until nine or ten o’clock. Then they halt and rest until three or four o’clock in the afternoon, when they move on and continue until late in the evening. Of course, the railways are not run on that principle, as the locomotive is not supposed to be affected by the outside temperature.
“But I am getting away from the southerly burster. The wind blew like a hurricane. It kept up this rate for about three hours, filling the air with dust so that we could not see across the street. Though the doors and windows were tightly closed, the dust found its way inside the house and was present everywhere; every article of furniture was covered with it.
“We found it in the food, we found it in our beds, and the next day when I opened my trunk to take out some articles of clothing, I actually found that the dust had worked its way inside in a perceptible quantity. One of the waiters of the hotel said, that always after a burster they found dust inside of bottles of mineral water which had been tightly corked up to the time of opening. I am inclined to doubt the truth of his assertion, particularly as he offered no documentary evidence to confirm it.
“Along towards night it came on to rain, and, oh, how it did rain! It poured as though the flood gates of the skies had all been opened at once. It rained not only cats and dogs, as the old expression has it, but lizards, scorpions, snakes, and I don’t know what else, at least it did figuratively. The gutters of the streets were filled, and then we were able to see how easy it was for a man, and especially for a child, to be drowned in them. I have seen it rain hard in a good many places, but am sure I never saw it rain harder than it did at the end of that southerly burster.
“I remarked as much to a gentleman whose acquaintance we had made in the hotel, and he answered:—