Phenix Gazette

TURKEY.

Constantinople, Oct. 10. On the 5th inst. a natural phenomenon, such as few people remember, and the effects of which have been most destructive, filled with terror the inhabitants of this country, who are, at the same time, suffering under all kinds of evils. After an uncommonly sultry night, threatening clouds rose about six in the morning, in the horizon to the South West, and a noise between thunder and tempest, and yet not to be compared with either, increased every moment, and the inhabitants of the capital, roused from their sleep, awaited with anxious expectation the issue of this threatening phenomenon. Their uncertainty was not of long duration—lumps of ice, as large as a man's foot, falling, first singly, and then like a thick shower of stones, which destroyed every thing that they came in contact with. The oldest persons do not remember ever to have seen such hail-stones. Some were picked up half an hour afterwards, which weighed above a pound.

The dreadful storm passed over Constantinople and along the Bosphorus, over Therapia, Buyukdere and Belgrade, and the fairest, nay, the only hopes of this beautiful and fertile tract, the vintage, just commenced, was destroyed in a day. Animals of all kinds, and even some persons, are said to have been killed; an innumerable quantity are wounded, and the damage done to the houses is incalculable. Besides that, scarcely a window has escaped in all the country. The force of the falling masses of ice was so great that they broke in atoms all the tiles on the roofs, and shattered like musket-balls planks half an inch thick. Since that day the rain has not ceased to pour down in torrents, and, from the slight way in which the houses are built, almost wholly consisting of windows, and with very flat roofs that have nothing to keep off the wet besides tiles, innumerable families are not much more comfortable than in bivouac.