Literary Weather: Thought it's been wet this summer? Just be grateful you don't live in Cherrapunji, writes Brendan McWilliams .
William Bulfin was an expert on our Irish rain. He was the author, you might recall, of Rambles in Eirinn, a travel memoir that cannot be said to have dated very well, but which at one time had an honoured place on every Irish bookshelf. "Irish rain of the summer and autumn," he wrote, "is a kind of damp poem. It is a soft, apologetic, modest kind of rain, as a rule; and even in its wildest moods, it gives you the impression that it is treating you as well as it can under the circumstances."
Following the first tentative drop, "another comes presently, and you feel it on your cheek. Then a few more come. Then the rest of the family encircle you shyly. They are not cold or heavy or splashy. They fall on you as if they were coming from the eyes of many angels weeping for your sins. They caress you rather than pelt you, and they are laden with perfume from the meadow flowers, or the glistening trees, or the sweet, rich earth, or the heathery bogland."
Now, although this may not coincide exactly with your personal memories of some recent deluges in Ireland, our rain, even taking into account the exceptional falls we have experienced in recent months, is harmless stuff compared to the downpours that occur in other places round the world.
Take Fergus Linehan's description of the monsoon rain in Under the Durian Tree: "Huge purple clouds would appear in the distance trailing curtains of rain. Lightning would crack with a frightening violence, followed by the first peals of thunder. The wind would rise, the approaching storm would be like a whisper, then a swelling roar, then the first drops splattering down, then a torrent, a waterfall of rain that seemed to cover the air in a solid sheet. On and on it would go, interspersed with ear-splitting lightning crashes and thunder like a thousand heavy guns, until gradually it lessened, passed and then was gone."
The summer monsoon rains of India and south-east Asia begin in late May or early June each year, shortly after the dry north-easterly winds that have predominated for the previous eight months have been replaced by moisture-laden south-westerlies streaming in from the Indian Ocean. Throughout the few months of its duration, the monsoon delivers about 90 per cent of the sub-continent's annual rainfall.
The monsoon rejuvenates a dying landscape. Through each blistering spring the arid soil has been baked lifeless by burning sun and desiccating winds. Then, in early summer, just when the heat seems insupportable, the clouds that have been piling up in the distance for some time disgorge their torrential rains upon a grateful land.
The monsoon is celebrated as deliverance. Children dance ecstatically in the heavy downpour, catching the precious drops in their open hands; the stifling heat is broken and the earth blooms fresh in green profusion. The rains are a vital life-giving force, and everyone knows that had they been delayed or weaker than usual, agricultural production would suffer, and great hardships would be visited on large sections of the population. But sometimes the land, baked hard as concrete, cannot absorb the rivers from the sky, and the waters drown dozens of people in their muddy tides.
The intensity of the monsoon downpours increases progressively as the warm humid air is forced to rise across the gently sloping Plateau of the Deccan towards the Himalayan Mountains. The climax of the annual cycle is usually experienced somewhere in the vicinity of a meteorologically famous little town called Cherrapunji, just south of the Himalayas on the Shillong Plateau in the far northeast of India. Cherrapunji has the second-highest average annual rainfall in the world, its normal yearly total of 11,430 millimetres being about ten times that of Ireland, and exceeded only by the 11,680 mm average of Mount Waialeale in Hawaii. But Cherrapunji is unique in also holding two long-standing records: between August 1860 and July 1861 it experienced 26,000 mm of rain, the most recorded anywhere in a 12-month period; and the 9,300 mm measured in July 1861 is a global record for one month.
Compared to such extremes, Ireland's typical annual rainfall of between 1,000 and 2,000 mm seems modest. Even the highest annual figure recorded here, the 4,000 mm or thereabouts measured in 1960 in the Kerry Mountains, pales into insignificance in comparison with the monsoon of south Asia. Only on those rare occasions when daily rainfalls in Ireland in excess of 200 mm in a 24-hour period occur - most notably in recent times in association with Hurricane Charley in August 1986 - can we acquire any concept of the sheer volume and scale of the annual rains of Cherrapunji.
