SOMETIMES, if you listen to a weather person with colourful turn of phrase, you will hear tornadoes referred to as the whirling dervishes" of meteorology. The dervishes were mystic mendicants of Persia, Turkey and Arabia, followers in general of Mohammed, and with ambitions not dissimilar to those of the more extreme monastic orders of our Christian heritage. Their devotional exercises, known as zikrs, appeared bizarre to Western eyes, and distinguished the different dervish orders from each other.
The Rufaiyeh, the howling dervishes, engaged in bodily self mutilation, uttering distinctive invocations as they did so. The Maulawiyeh, or dancing dervishes, swallowed live coals, slivers of glass or writhing serpents, which makes their eponymous behaviour easy enough to understand. The Kalanderiyeh, the wandering dervishes, on the other hand, regarded constant travel as obligatory, and provided inspiration for Ralph Waldo Emerson as he contemplated the fruit less ennui of his wasting life: the "hypocritic Days" he said were:
Most spectacular of all, however, were the whirling dervishes, whose speciality was a frenzied dance, a seemingly never ending pirouette that was said to symbolise the eternal existence of the Deity, and at whose close the participants fell into a cataleptic trance. The violent rotational energy of these mystic dancers was so very memorable that they have become a metaphor for a phenomenon in the world of weather.
A whirling dervish of this kind appeared recently in Whitegate, Co Clare. Joseph Collins of that parish tells me that around 3 a.m. on Tuesday, October 22nd, a sudden violent wind cut a trail of destruction through the countryside 120 yards in width and a mile or so in length. Trees, telegraph poles and walls directly on the track were all laid low; an ash tree was stripped completely on one side, while its other flank escaped unscathed, almost, but not quite, as if it had been struck by lightening.
There was, in fact, thunder in the air that night, and this, combined with the characteristically elongated and very localised nature of the trail of damage, leaves little doubt that a tornado was the culprit. We tend to think of tornados as American, but they can, and do, occur virtually anywhere in the world outside the polar regions. Now and then they occur in Ireland, too; there are probably fewer than, say, 10 a year, and are considerably less vicious that their continental cousins, but as we have seen in Co Clare, they can leave an impressive trail of damage in their wake.