The wind returned this week, but as it's our last full week of digging we must learn to deal with it. It's worse than before, as is unpredictable in direction, timing and force. What we think is happening is a temperature difference between the water and the land. The air mass moves inland at a high altitude, then, hitting the mountains, it cools and sweeps back down slope and out to sea.
Of course this is complicated, since we have so many caverns and outcroppings where we work, there is really to telling where it will go. The only warning we have is a terrible moaning in the hills, then a shriek as the air hits the crags turning and sweeping salt spray and dirt across the site. The best we can really do is face away, close our eyes, duck over anything important and cover our ears. The soil is extremely fine, more like powder, and is like the fine sand that buries cities in desert sandstorms.
It frequently knocks even the stoutest digger off their feet and has tossed zambili, records and my hat over the cliffs, the last never to be recovered. At night it wakes us with almost-human screams, rattling doors and causing the water in our toilet bowls to slosh.
Working in the wind makes us all hungry, so last night the other students and I ate at a fish taverna on the beach called The Muses. We hadn't been before, and their menu was the length of a small novel. However we sussed out what we wanted and ended up splitting 8 large dishes 5 ways. On Thursday we'll bring the whole crew there again!
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