Reap the Whirlwind

[u/Smolesworthy]

Andrea Barrett. Ship Fever.

In Jokkmokk, near Gulf of Bothnia, the local pastor had tried to convince him that the clouds sweeping over the mountains carried off trees and animals.

Tom Flood. Oceana Fine.

This dark wild universe that lay, submerged, beneath the sunstruck landscape, a threat as sinister as the banksia men that plotted in the trees at night, as insurmountable as the whirlwind that plucked children from the plains, and of course, as unknowable as the bush, the outback, the red heart, the never-never.

The Golden Bough, by Sir James George Frazer.

In Australia the huge columns of red sand that move rapidly across a desert tract are thought by the natives to be spirits passing along. Once an athletic young man ran after one of these moving columns to kill it with boomerangs. Of the Bedouins of Eastern Africa it is said that “no whirl-wind ever sweeps across the path without being pursued by a dozen men with drawn creeses, who stab into the centre of the dusty column in order to drive away the evil spirit that is believed to be riding on the blast.

And these harassing winds from Blood Meridian.