An eerie other world
At the top of the Beaufort scale, fierce winds sculpt surreal forms in the stone of Ghost City, Erik Nilsson reports in Karamay, Xinjiang.
It's a land where the banshees' shrieks eat the earth. Ancient people believed the hellish sound of the wind gnawing the Gobi landscape in the Ghost City of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region's Karamay carried the screams of the underworld's denizens.
The local ethnic Mongolians call this badland Sulumuhak, and Kazakhs call it Shayitankerxi, both of which mean "where demons appear". This is how its names, sometimes translated as Devil City or Mysterious World, came to be.
These screeches devour rocks. Wind erosion is the primary force that wrinkles Mother Earth's exposed face across this 121-square-kilometer expanse.
The Ghost City's yardangs — ridges and outcrops formed by the wind — are not so much wrought by the sands of time as they are sandblasted for eons. The hurricane-force winds that assault their surfaces can reach Level 12 — the Beaufort scale's fiercest extreme.
