It was Prometheus - or so the story goes - who first presented us with fire. Unknown to Zeus, he lit a torch at the golden chariot of the sun and, sneaking it out of heaven by a subterfuge, he thereby conferred on humankind a singular advantage over other creatures.
But the gift of Prometheus to man has great destructive power when unconstrained, as we have seen of late with the spectacular forest fires in Greece and Florida.
The weather, obviously, plays a crucial part in such occurrences. Lightning, for example, is a very common source of ignition; and even the sun can be a culprit, since if bright sunshine is focused to a point by broken glass it provides a tiny but effective solar furnace.
And whatever the reason for the spark, a forest fire is viable only when the weather at the time, and that of the recent past, combine to provide amenable conditions.
But large fires sometimes produce sufficient heat to generate their own weather. It happens when the high temperatures at ground level make the air above exuberantly buoyant, and produce powerful updrafts in the atmosphere - great invisible fountains of hot air surging into the sky for thousands of feet above the flames.
This in turn causes air from the surrounding countryside to be sucked in on all sides to the centre of the fire, fanning the flames to even greater heights. And sometimes too, in a process similar to that which occurs naturally on a hot and thundery day, tall cumulus clouds may form above the conflagration.
In extreme cases, some of the updrafts over a great fire acquire vorticity, and appear as whirlwinds and tornadoes to add to the confusion.
Such fire-storms may develop into localised tornadoes that uproot trees and hurl them like giant torches into the air.
Spectacular occurrences of this kind were reported in the fierce fires that followed the 1923 earthquake in Japan, when up to a third of the 143,000 victims were reckoned to have been victims of the "dragon twists" - the fire-induced tornadoes that caused havoc in the aftermath of the tremor.
Another well-documented example was the great five-day oil fire at San Luis Obispo, California, in April 1926.
On that occasion, hundreds of whirlwinds were seen over or near the flames - "gyrating, writhing, funnel-shaped clouds, the whiteness of the condensed water vapour in the vortices being clearly visible against the dark background of the black smoke.
Some of the smaller funnels appeared no more than a foot or two in diameter, which gave them the appearance of ropes dangling from the clouds of smoke."