Floodgate

“ It is true that a wall of earth everywhere controls the flood to-day, and that the traveller in his boat does not see, as he would have seen two thousand years ago, the glint of water to the north and south at high tide over tufted grass and drowned banks of mud for miles upon either side of his going. ”

“ But at new moons, especially when they occur in conjunction with a night tide, the flood sets in with such extraordinary violence that on its beginning to advance, even though the sea be calm, its roar is heard by those living near the river’s mouth, sounding like the tumult of battle heard far off, and soon after the sea with its hissing waves bursts over the bare shoals. ”

“ Into each other's eyes. The rushing flood
Flings them apart: the youth goes down; the maid
With hands outstretched in vain, and streaming eyes,
Waits for the next high wave to follow him.
An aged man succeeds; his bending form
Sinks slowly. Mingling with the sullen stream
Gleam the white locks, and then are seen no more.
Lo! wider grows the stream—a sea-like flood
Saps earth's walled cities; massive palaces
Crumble before it; fortresses and towers
Dissolve in the swift waters; populous realms
Swept by the torrent see their ancient tribes
Engulfed and lost ”

“ We could have saved more, but many were afraid to let go the debris. It was an awful sight. The immense volume of water was roaring along, whirling over huge rocks, dashing against the banks and leaping high in the air, and this seething flood was strewn with timber, trunks of trees, parts of houses, and hundreds of human beings, cattle and almost every animal.
“The fearful peril of the living was not more awful than the horror of hundreds of distorted, bleeding corpses whirling along the avalanche of death. ”

“ The planters and all their available forces, it may be, have been busily fighting the rising floods, but have been finally vanquished momentarily by wind and wave. Hoping to hold the levee, few, perhaps, have removed their families, goods, or chattels, or livestock. Then when the break comes, the raging flood rushes in over the fields and woods, demolishing out-houses, shaking cottages, drowning stock, hurling masses of drift against dwellings that might otherwise stand—seeming as though a living genius of destruction. ”

“ The wind and flood waters, travelling in opposite directions, conflicted with great violence. The roaring, boastful wind, as it lashed the racing, defiant waters into angry waves, and the universe-filling sounds of the seething, surging flood-waters, as they wrestled with and overbore all opposing forces, made storm music, compared with which the artifices of man touch the infinitely puny. Darkness and the blinding rain had driven most of the river watchers indoors. ”

“ Year after year a hundred thousand levee builders, with forty thousand teams of mules or so, and operating huge dredging-machines, repair the damage of the spring tides, build new levees, raise old ones, and pave the banks with revetment—great Willow-tree carpets or rugs covered with broken stone to keep the flood in bounds by stopping the washing away of the soft river banks and the undermining of the protection. ”

“ Æolus and all his crew have spent their efforts upon its sides; floods of water, that deadliest foe to all the strongholds of earth, have done their utmost to sap its foundations; but yet it stands immovable; it holds its dry valley inviolate, and imperiously bids the rushing stream to seek another channel.
Nor can the waters of the torrent itself fail to arrest our attention as they tear along, with the speed of an arrow, through the deep ravine. ”

“ Our people were not slow to take advantage of Nature’s kindness and build up once more the happy homes destroyed by the flood. But now we were brought face to face with a most wonderful state of things. Here we were shut in, surrounded by a vast network of streams, and yet taught by our terrible experience so to dread water, that not even to escape from death itself could our people be induced to swim across one of these little rivers or pass over it in any sort of boat. ”

“ With a fierce rush, like a live crittur, the flood threw itself at the sea. We just footed it over the small waves, then we cut the top off the first roller, throwing up columns of spray high as the church steeple, and then the fight began. Behind us there was a hundred miles of flood; before us was the tide with the Atlantic at the back, and the sea after the first shock jes’ gave a sort of surly roar, and away back of the outermost breaker I seed a dark line coming along steady and unbroken. ”

“ The downpour fell with the heavy uninterrupted rush of a sweeping flood, with a sound of unchecked overwhelming fury that called to one's mind the images of collapsing bridges, of uprooted trees, of undermined mountains. No man could breast the colossal and headlong stream that seemed to break and swirl against the dim stillness in which we were precariously sheltered as if on an island. ”

“ The tradition of a flood would naturally arise, 1st, from the destruction of a tribe or part of a tribe by the sudden rising of a river or mountain stream—that is from a modern event such as has occurred at some time in the history of nearly every people, and which a hundred years and a fertile imagination would readily have converted into a universal inundation. 2d. From the finding of sea-shells and other marine relics inland, and even on high mountains, suggesting to the natives' untutored mind what it proves to later scientific research—the fact that water once covered all. ”

“ The river boundary in summer flood,
The swirling waters as they rush and roar,
Mock at the wearied limbs that reach their banks,
And can no more, although the foe is on them!
Numbers die here; numbers plunge in—and drown. ”

“ When the light brightened they could see below them the angry water, creeping every instant closer to their places of refuge, beaten into foam by the terrible downpour, and sometimes, moved by a mysterious impulse, rising in sweeping waves which threatened to carry everything before them.
Every few minutes one of the great structures would sway, crack, crumble, and go down into the seething flood, the cries of the lost souls being swallowed up in the thunder of the fall. ”

“ It seems horrible—it is horrible—to think of that yellow flood pouring into pleasant rooms where a few hours before the family sat in peace and fancied security—roaring over the threshold, swirling higher and higher against the walls, setting the cherished household treasures astray, driving the furniture hither and thither, drowning out cheerful rooms in darkness and death. ”

“ Though primarily trading towns, linked together once in the sovereign confederacy of the Hanseatic League, they fixed their sites on the last spurs of firm ground running out into the soft, yielding alluvium, which was constantly exposed to inundation. Land high enough to be above the ever threatening flood of river and storm-driven tide on this flat coast, and solid enough to be built upon, could not be found immediately on the sea. ”

“ The people crowded out of their houses along the thickly settled streets awe-struck and wondering. No one knew the man, and some thought he was a maniac and laughed. On and on, at a deadly pace, he rode, and shrilly rang out his awful cry. In a few moments, however, there came a cloud of ruin down the broad streets, down the narrow alleys, grinding, twisting, hurling, over-turning, crashing—annihilating the weak and the strong. It was the charge of the flood, wearing its coronet of ruin and devastation, which grew at every instant of its progress. ”

“ How long would it be before the last hand's breadth of sand remaining would be blown into the trough, and they would be left without the smallest shelter, even supposing that the flood did not rise above the summit?
And should neither of these things happen--should this point remain unsubmerged--the Count shuddered again and again. How could poor human nature endure it all--the driving storm, the torrents of spray which were unceasingly flung up over the hill, the long long night which now began to close in? ”

“ You would see a building standing in apparent security above the swollen banks of the river, the people rushing about the doors, some seeming to think that safety lay indoors, while others rushed toward higher ground, stumbling and falling in the muddy streets, and then the flood rolled over them, crushing in the house with a crash like thunder, and burying house and people out of sight entirely. ”

“ As far inland as the eye can reach there is nothing but flood to be seen, the currents opening out and racing away in every direction. At some distance away may be seen a flooded settlement, the water washing the windows of fifteen or twenty abandoned cottages. On a huge mound some five or six feet out of the outflow, is a group of disconsolate horses and mules who have taken refuge from the rising flood, and other hungry-looking brutes wander over the levee. ”

“ But there is something greater in its tragedy than all this—something greater than a great region where splendid cities, towns and humble villages alike are without resource—something greater than a region of broken dams and embankments and of placid rivers gone mad in flood, bridgeless, uncontrollable, widened into lakes, into seas. It is the hundreds of dead who died a hideous death, and the hundreds of thousands of living who are left helpless and homeless, and all but hopeless. ”

“ Millions of people were affected by the flood, and the newspapers and magazines of the whole world recorded its incidents and features, though none, nor all of them together were able to give an adequate impression of the spectacle of power, the fearsomeness and the grandeur of that majestic flow of water. ”

“ The flood rises still higher, in places it breaks the banks of great rivers, houses, temples, city walls and whole villages are swept away by the swift brown water, and thousands of men, women and children perish. Often, too, fires break out in crowded villages and towns. ”

“ Those who resided where the vast mass of eruptive matter broke forth, filled with consternation and dread, had to flee almost naked from their houses to find shelter and safety on higher ground from the desolating, foul, muddy flood, leaving furniture and cattle behind them — a prey to the black and nauseous stream. ”

“ This reckless policy of securing additional land regardless of consequences has greatly contributed to the more frequent occurrence of the very widespread inundations resulting from the bursting of the vast volume of pent-up flood-waters through breaches in the banks, which descend with torrential violence upon the plains below, causing great destruction of life and property. ”

“ A broken roof it now was, and through the rift overhead the moonlight poured in a suffusive flood, illuminating all the space beneath. She heard the plaintive drip, drip, drip, from some pool among the shingles where the rain had found a lodgment. The river flashed in myriad ripples, as steadily, ceaselessly it swept on its surging way to the Gulf. ”

“ When the rains fall upon the open, unwooded country, unless it is of a quite level character, they flow off at once into the beds of the neighboring streams, and pour their united flood into the larger rivers, swelling their volume rapidly to such an extent that their waters can not be confined within their banks, but break out and overspread the adjacent lands, carrying destruction oftentimes to the growing crops, covering fertile fields with masses of gravel and rubbish of various sorts, interfering with manufacturing interests, and often destroying life itself. ”

“ If the scene upon the levee is exciting when efforts are made to avoid breaks, still more so is it when a small break is being closed. The scurrying to and fro; the hoarse shouting of orders; the wild cries for aid from threatened points; men plunging up to their necks in the rushing flood, driving stakes, dragging sacks of earth, heaving in boulders and rubble stone; others bringing timbers and planks from hundreds of yards away ”

“ Though true it is that the King's men set swift keels on the Sundering Flood stuffed of men-at-arms, and these would land on the eastern bank so far as a twenty or thirty miles up, and plunder and ravage the country-folk, or whiles would come upon trains of victuals and suchlike wending towards the eastern city; and many fierce deeds they did, which made them no better beloved, so that men got to saying that the King's men were but little better than the very Skinners themselves. ”

“ The greater also would be the probability of the stream, on the cessation of the flood, not returning to its original channel, which might have become obliterated or filled up, but of its flowing along some new course, it may be miles away from its former channel. Even when not flooded so as to overflow their banks, rivers along which a larger body of water flowed than there does at present, would, so long as they were not confined within deep valleys, have a tendency to wander over a much wider tract of country than that now occupied by their valleys. ”

“ Hubbell, to the scene of disaster, where millions of acres of the richest valley, cotton and sugar lands of America, and thousands upon thousands of homes under the waters of the mightiest of rivers—where the swift rising floods overtook alike man and beast in their flight of terror, sweeping them ruthlessly to the gulf beyond, or leaving them clinging in famishing despair to some trembling roof or swaying tree top till relief could reach and rescue them. ”