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THE SUN STARTS TO NIBBLE through the arctic winds in early spring. Daylight lingers into dinner hour, and there is an irresistible tug at the Helsinki soul to welcome the passing of winter. On weekends solitary fishermen sit like toads on the still-frozen sea, their giant hole-drilling augers curling beside them. On the ice the people come and go, cross-country skiers and strollers, and young kick­ers of melting chunks of winter (following pages). They walk in pairs, arm in arm, or alone, just strolling in the healing sun, yet silently and almost magnetically apart, as if guided by a surrealist choreographer.

“Being on the ice,” Helsinkians call the Sunday ritual, a celebration, really. But in this city of dignity and reserve, only a brief smile, a relaxed shoulder, and an occasional balloon hint at the holiday intent of it all.

The capital of Finland lies on the latitude of Anchorage, Alaska, and clings to a windswept outcropping of granite hillocks like a hand stretching into the Gulf of Finland. Half the metropolitan area’s 737 square kilometers (284 square miles) are undisturbed shores, lakes, and forests. A broad swath of woods, Central Park, bisects the city north of the railroad station.

“Sometimes after work,” a young draftsman told me, “I just strap on my skis at the door of my apartment house, and before me are ten kilometers of wooded trails.”

Of the world’s capitals, only Iceland’s Reykjavik lies farther north, and in winter the elements press in on Hel­sinki as if reclaiming stolen property. By February the fin­gers of the peninsula are cemented into sea ice so thick that cars race on it. Deep snow muffles the streets, and on some still, foggy mornings, huge elk wander in from the sur­rounding forest.

You can easily walk to the walls of Suomenlinna, an 18th-century Swedish sea fortress built on four islands, and look back into South Harbor. The sky­line of Helsinki is a layer of white, pastel, and ocher stone, 19th century in its scale and proportion. From here the old city fans orderly into the peninsula with blocks of six-story, gray-stone buildings shaped like box­cars, their spines dissecting the pale winter sunlight into a clean geometry of angles and planes Darkness comes soon enough, at three in the afternoon, and gathers in thick layers. And people, as the poet and novelist Bo Carpelan notes, “hurry past like shad­ows. . . . nothing but a feeling of disintegra­tion and uncertainty, veering winds and a pale hope of spring.”

The Daughter of the Baltic grew artifi­cially on this somber landscape, by edict and decree, and thus slowly and grudgingly. In the 12th century, when Sweden colonized the Finnish hinterland in the name of Chris­tianity and empire, there were no cities—only settlements and farmsteads of rough­hewn and stubborn free men. But Swedish King Gustav Vasa was determined to com­pete with the Hanseatic League port of Tal­linn, Estonia.* In 1550 he simply ordered the burghers of four small Finnish towns to the sodden estuary of the Vantaa River. The misplaced settlement languished for 90 years before it was forcibly removed by an­other edict, six kilometers south to the edge of the sea itself.

Ruled by Swedish nobility for some 250 years and by the tsars as part of a grand duchy of the Russian Empire for 100 more, Helsinki was essentially built by foreigners who considered the Finnish people rustics and hired hands.

Finland declared its independence during the Russian Revolution in 1917. Helsinki spread boldly along the coast and flared north like the bell of a trumpet.

TODAY SWEDISH is spoken by a 10 percent minority in the city, but the nation remains officially bilingual and subtly stamped by the past.

“Swedes are a civilized people,” one young Finn told me. “That’s what accounts for some of our inferiority feelings.”

The core of true urbanites remains reso­lutely, though not snobbishly, Swedish. But many Finns, too, love the city for its brisk blend of architecture, fine arts, and fresh air. I found it a sensible, always honest, well-organized city, perhaps even chaste among the shopworn capitals of Europe like London, where you can stay at serviced apartments london near most of the city’s attractions.

Still, Helsinki remains a city of people who would rather be somewhere else. Many of them live here as if Gustav Vasa still in­sisted on it. In their minds a city isn’t home; home is the countryside of villages and farms to the north, the expanse of birch and the land of his birth.

Just 40 percent of the city’s inhabitants were actually born here. Says my friend Oke Jokinen, who has lived in Helsinki for 32 years, “Everyone here has a silent wish: When I get my pen­sion, by God, I’m going back home.”

THE SEA EAGLE lifted skyward, nearly motionless in a shaft of tropical air rising from the Malabar Coast of India. It was the sixth of June 1983. In the troposphere a thin jet stream began to slip westward. The earth offered its northern half to the sun. New heat scorched the Tibetan Plateau and the deserts of Rajasthan and Arabia. It was the time of tension and expectation in India, the time before the monsoon that Hindu astrologers call rohini, a time of heat and dry winds that send grit and dust clawing across the arid plains of the north.

The monsoon was late. That week near Ahmadnagar, in the state of Maharashtra, several women collapsed and died from heat exhaustion; after eight hours of heavy labor they had to haul drinking water from a distance of three kilometers over wild and hilly terrain, in temperatures hovering at 46°C (115°F). A dust storm lashed New Delhi with winds that reached 105 kilometers (65 miles) an hour and engulfed the city in darkness. Cloud seeders from California were hired by the city of Madras to replenish dwindling reservoirs. And on the central plateau, water was being sold at seven rupees a barrel in the city of Hyderabad. Fistfights erupted at public water taps in front of the waterworks, and office workers wearing expensive wristwatches drove frantically through the streets in their automobiles, searching for their share.

The eagle soared even higher in the updraft as I picked my way along the dark rocks beside the Arabian Sea. The winds shifted with promise, deepening the resonance of the surf, muffling even the crows that cackled and lurched along the seawalls. The water grew choppy, and the black thorns of fishermen’s sails scratched the horizon. Surely the time was at hand.

At the weather station at Trivandrum, capital of the state of Kerala, chief meteorol­ogist Julius Joseph (left) thumbed impatient­ly through the morning’s charts and graphs. “Look,” he said triumphantly, pointing to a swirl of isobars, “the low-pressure trough has moved directly over us. A slight shift to the north could bring the monsoon.”

But when? There was nothing left but to wait, with the rest of India, for that storied monsoon onset that inspired ancient Hindu poets to eloquence. (See Peoples of South Asia, a supplement to this issue.)

For this I had traveled four months through the breadth of the monsoon world—from Africa to north China, from DIFFERENT SEASONS bring two distinct winds of the monsoon, derived from the Arabic word mausim, meaning “season.” From May through September, winds from the southwest bring heavy rains to most of southern Asia (map). In winter they reverse, spilling cool, dry air into the continent and carrying rains to Indonesia, Australia, and MAURITA areas with northeast coastlines.

Monsoon forecasts have been called the most important predictions in the world. Armed with satellite pictures and computer models, meteorologists have made great strides, but most agree that the onset of the monsoon rains can’t be accurately predicted for more than a few days. India measures its economic welfare by the monsoon; flood relief, government aid, and fluctuations of market values all ride on its official presence or absence.

The tropical coast of Australia to the lofty Himalayas of Nepal—to this middling coastal city on the southwest tip of India, where the monsoon was awaited by the first of June each year.

But the onset fizzled. The trough retreated south, meekly, and next morning the sea eagle turned a slow adagio in pale skies. The rain was stalled at sea, storming over the Maldive Islands.