Hard as the autumn North Wind hits a leveled field
just drenched in a downpour, quickly dries it off
and the farmer is glad and starts to till his soil –
so the whole plain was parched and the god of fire devoured
all the dead.
– Homer
The Iliad, Book 21, lines 393-397. Like the North Wind quickly dries out a farmer’s field drenched in a downpour, so god of fire Hephaestus blasts all the river with fire burning all the corpses left by Achilles, Homer tells us in one of his wonderful extended similes.