TRANSYLVANIAN snowstorms have a tendency to end abruptly. Take, for example, this description of a dark November day: "The wind now came in fierce bursts and the snow was driven in fury as it swept in circling eddies. At times we could not see and arm's length before us; but at others as the hollow sounding wind swept by us, it seemed to clear the air space so that we could see afar off."
Yet, less than an hour later, conditions have improved dramatically: "The sun was now right down upon the mountaintop, and the red gleams fell upon my face so that it was bathed in a rosy light."
The observer in this instance is Mina Harker, and her report was published 100 years ago today as part of the denouement to the novel Dracula. Indeed, as we know, this clearance was eventful; between the snowstorm and the sunset scene, the eponymous villain is stabbed through the heart, has his head cut off, and, as Mina graphically puts it, "before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight".
Apart from its other virtues, Dracula is remarkable in that many of its characters would have made excellent weather oh servers, recording as they did every meteorological detail in their diaries, letters and even on a phonograph.
The story opens, for example, with Jonathan Harker on his way to see the Count, and he duly puts on record the weather of a sultry Transylvanian May: "There were dark, rolling clouds overhead, and in the air the heavy oppressive sense of thunder. It seemed as if the mountain range had separated two atmospheres, and that now we had gone into a thunderous one."
But perhaps the best weather sequence of the tale is to be found in the cutting from The Dailygraph, which describes an August storm in the Yorkshire town of Whitby. After an impressive account of an appropriately lurid setting sun, the excerpt tells us: "The wind fell away entirely during the evening, and shortly before 10 o'clock the stillness of the air became oppressive. Then, without warning, the tempest broke with a rapidity which seemed incredible. The waves rose in growing fury, each overtopping its fellow, until the lately glassy sea was like a roaring and devouring monster. Whitecrested waves beat madly on the level sands, rushed up the shelving cliffs, and swept with their spume the lighthouses rising from the end of either pier at Whitby Harbour." On such a day as this, apparently, did Dracula arrive in England.