258 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



earthquake have been mistranslated. The earthquake is thus put 

 out of court, and we are left with what help we can get from the 

 hurricane, a kind of disturbance which often vies with the earth- 

 quake in the destructive nature of the sea waves to which it gives 

 rise. 



The Andaman Islands of the East Indies are a center which 

 give birth to some of the most terrific hurricanes in the world. 

 Traveling more or less westward and northward, these whirl- 

 winds sweep over the waters of the Bay of Bengal and raise the 

 sea into waves mountains high, which every now and again rush 

 over the low-lying lands of the Ganges delta, overwhelming the 

 unfortunate inhabitants by myriads. Thus on the night of Octo- 

 ber 14, 1737, one of these waves, estimated at forty feet in height, 

 suddenly overtook the dwellers by the Ganges and destroyed 

 them to the number of one hundred thousand, or, as some say, 

 three hundred thousand souls. These storms do not, as a rule, 

 travel toward the Persian Gulf, and the North Arabian Sea is 

 singularly free from them ; but Suess, tracing the course of the 

 storm of October 24, 1843, suggests that for once, in the case of 

 the deluge, an East Indian storm may have lost its way and blun- 

 dered, as it were, into the Persian Gulf. The track of this storm 

 of 1842 was as follows : At five o'clock on October 24th it reached 

 Pondicherry ; it then slightly altered its direction and veered 

 more to the southwest, and on the 25th at midday it crossed the 

 western Ghats, and then divided into two parts ; the south center 

 need not concern us. The northern center traveled northeast- 

 ward toward the Persian Gulf, and was felt from the Gulf of Aden 

 to Cape Guardafui, wrecking in this tract a number of vessels. 



The greatest estimated height of storm waves is from forty to 

 forty-five feet, and, as Suess points out, it must have needed a 

 much greater wave than this to drown out all Mesopotamia up to 

 the Nizir hills. How much greater, is a question we are fortu- 

 nately able to answer positively, thanks to the accurate measure- 

 ments made by the engineer Czernik during a survey for a pro- 

 jected railway. The Tigris rises very slowly from its mouth 

 inland, but at Bagdad it is already one hundred and fifty-four feet 

 above the sea level, and at Mansurijah, the lowest point where its 

 tributary Diala Tschai emerges from the Hamrin Mountains, the 

 height is given as two hundred and eighty-five feet ; but the land 

 of Nizir lies even still more to the north than this, and the Lower 

 Zab, which cuts through it, can not have a less elevation than six 

 hundred or seven hundred feet. No storm wave of which we 

 have any record, no recorded earthquake wave, nor any combina- 

 tion of the two, approaches even remotely the height that would 

 be required to carry the sea even to Bagdad; while as for the 

 Nizir Mountains, the Valiant Pherson, who "nearly spoilt the 



