MDMD(6): The weather report

[Michel Ryckx]

"cloaked against the Etesian wind" (77.4).

This wind blows regularly from the North between the months of May and
October, and the beginning of the storms during the Fall in the Egean
Sea.  Using this winds, one could easily take the route from Rhodos to
Alexandria, as did a traveller like Belon du Mans in 1550 (see: Fernand
Braudel, La Mer Méditerranée, previously quoted, chapter 4, subchapter
4).

The Romans, considering the winds to be the children of Aeolus, knew and
named many kinds of winds.  The wind from the South, who had many names,
coming from the Sahara was quite often considered deadly.  They
nick-named it 'albus', white.
This is from a latin - Dutch book:

Dr. B. L Meulenbrook, Q. Horatii Flacci Poemata, Carmina - Iambi, 1984,
Uitgevery Eisma B.V. Leeuwarden (The Netherlands), ISBN 90-70052 29-6

where the text of Carmen I-3 warns Virgil when he wants to take a trip
to Greece by boat and says:

...qui fragilem truci
commisi pelago ratem
primus nec timuit praecipitem Africanum (wind from the south)

decertantem Aquilonibus (a north aestern wind).
. . .

Two small remarks:
(1) there's Cornelius, haunted by the "steadfast Gravity of all Africa";
that's the North for them.  A Possible Connection?

Non-M&D:
(2) A deadly wind, from the South, what does this say about Weissmann in
V., chapter 9?

Then there's a mention of clouds at 77.3: "Nights of Cloud", which makes
it impossible to observe Duck and Ducklings.  But then we meet another
cloud: "the clouds of aromatic pipe-smoke" at 79.17, or Cornelius's
"blue tobacco Fumulus" at 79.31), while a Fumulus is indeed a kind of
cloud, diminutive of lat. Fumus, a cloud who has indeed the form of
Exhaled Nicotine.  And not to forget: the mentions of "Italian Volcano"
(79.12), repeated at (79.18-19) "another volcanickal Emission"

Not to mention Klout, a 70s Southafrican girls band with very, very bad
music.

Michel.