I am not a physicist. ‘She who must be obeyed’, however, is. She has explained to me why the sun may appear to be red.
The reason that I’m mentioning a red sun is because that’s what we’ve had, for a couple of days now, as the dreadful fires to the south of us have been raging.
About 50km away from us lies the town of Pedrogao de Grande, where some 60 or more people, including children, perished in the cataclysmic, awful fires recently.
The explanation seems to be that a lightning strike set a tree ablaze and it simply spread, rapidly, due to tinder-dry conditions, high temperatures of 35 plus and a strong wind.
Within a short time, the worst fire anyone alive can recall was raging and moving faster than a man can run.
Within two days it was in between Gois and Arganil, some 30km south-south-east of us, and there was a keen eye being kept on the columns of smoke just over the horizon.
At no point was there any sense of worry; it was still a long way off.
Some friends in Arganil had a bag packed, just in case they were evacuated, as many in the villages had been, as the fire marched inexorably towards them, like the monsters from the War of the Worlds.
We sat one evening and watched ash flakes falling on the cobbles in our courtyard. It was like a slow, slight fall of snow, only a bit more grey than white.
That evening, the sun was a definite red colour and I was aware of my lack of physics knowledge as issues such as particle size, wavelength of light and the resultant scattering of different parts of the visible spectrum were discussed by ‘she who must be obeyed’ and me.
I’m being a bit disingenuous here; there was precious little discussion, but I was impressed with the clarity of her explanation, as I sat, feeling words such as diffraction and Tyndall effect slide gently past my awake but strangely unreceptive mind.
I seem to have a gift for looking as if I’m awake and understanding things, yet not being so.
As ‘she who must be obeyed’ asked finally, ‘is that clear, then?’ I found myself nodding sagely and even pursing my lips thoughtfully.
Nevertheless, the ash falling and the strangely red sun put me in mind of Pliny the younger’s stories of Vesuvius erupting in AD79, when he noted, from more than 30 miles away, that ash was falling on him and needed to be brushed off.
There is something corrupt and foul about falling ash and the sun becoming blood-red that put me in mind of Dante’s inferno.
I wonder which circle of Hell could correspond with the so-called ‘road of death’, where so many died just a day or so ago, stuck in their cars.
It seems that some 2,000 soldiers are now helping the 1,700 firemen by using massive earthmoving equipment to clear great tracts of land, to act as firebreaks.
It seems to be working; I certainly hope so.
l Mike Gaunt is a former headmaster at St Christopher’s School, Bahrain
– mikegaunt@gmail.com