(原版)澳大利亞語文第四冊 LESSON 19

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LESSON 19 FLOODS

FLOODS

“MOTHER , may I go down to the river? It has stopped raining now!”

“Very well, Tom,” replied his mother, “only, be careful, and don’t stay away long!”

So Tom ran off down the paddock, to the river which flowed past his father’s selection [1] .

It had been raining, more or less, for ten days. Sometimes the rain fell as though in solid masses; then, when the furious downfall abated [2] , light showers would follow. The ground was soaked, and the water ran freely over the surface to the lower levels. It filled the water- holes and lagoons, the creeks began to rise, and soon were emptying their rapid yellowish waters into the river.

“All hot countries,” Tom’s father had once told him, “are liable to floods. The sun has great power in the tropics [3] to draw up the water from the sea. You know how the vapour rises into the air. The higher the temperature of the air the greater amount of moisture it can hold.

“When the air is cooled the vapour becomes visible, as cloud, or if it be near the earth’s surface, as mist. When the air becomes cooled gradually, and to a slight extent, the rain drops are small and the rain is light; when the vapour is suddenly lowered in temperature the drops are large and the rain heavy.

“In some tropical countries where the sun is always at work on large bodies of water, vapour collects in the air to a very large amount, and it may take days, or even weeks, to condense [4] and fall. Whenever it rains more than two or three days continually, the water that falls has not the time to soak through the soil or be carried off in the streams; so it gathers, and gathers, and at last we have a flood.”

When Tom got to the river, where the crossing was, he found the water rising rapidly. A little thought was enough to show him that he should go back home at once and tell his father the news. There had been a flood in that district twenty years before, and many were the stories which the older folk could relate.

One settler remembered the day when the river rose forty feet in a few hours, and swept away fencing, crops, stock, and houses. All the low-lying paddocks were turned into an inland sea. Everybody for miles round had suffered in some way, and it was only, as it were, by a miracle [5] that no human lives were lost. A whole family had been compelled to camp for two days in the upper branches of a giant gum tree while the swirling waters hurried past, carrying with them all sorts of debris [6] .

A TOWN IN FLOOD

One hutkeeper had a doleful remembrance of the flood. He had been afraid to keep his savings in the hut with him, and for safety had concealed the money in a fallen tree. The flood came in the night, and when the man woke next morning the tree had been swept down stream, and with it his seventy pounds.

A sheep farmer living thirty miles away from Tom’s home had lost five thousand sheep in a flood that came on the district unawares. Many of the settlers, too, had tales to tell how goods went up in price; how waggons and teams were bogged on the flooded roads; how household belongings were taken away on hastily built rafts and placed in safety on higher ground; how the mails and nearly all communications with distant places were delayed for three weeks, till the waters had gone down and travelling was safe once more.

Tom ran all the way home, but the news of the flood was there before him. Fortunately, his father had built the house high on the top of a hill, above all flood marks, so there was nothing to fear except for the stock. Already Tom’s brothers were out on horseback on the ridges, and by nightfall the farmer’s cattle were safe.

As they sat on the veranda after tea watching the rain coming down steadily, father told them many stories of floods he had known.

“What are floods good for?” asked Tom. “You see that rich flat yonder?” answered his father, pointing to about one hundred and sixty acres of splendid soil. “That soil was washed down from the mountains and left behind when the flood waters went down. That flat is the best block of land in the district.”

“Floods clean out rivers, too, so they say,” added Bessie, who had been listening carefully all the time. “True,” rejoined her father, “they are sometimes blessings in disguise. Moreover, the more we study rainfall, the easier it becomes to prepare for floods in such a way as to prevent any great losses front them.

“By widening rivers, for instance, we can give the flood waters more room to get away before any damage is done to the towns on the river banks. By building dams at different points of a river’s course, flood water can be held there long enough to allow the rainfall lower down to get free.

“By telegraph and telephone we can rapidly find out how much rain has fallen on the watershed of any river, and so can calculate very closely not only the height to which the waters will rise, but also the hour when they will be at their highest. Being forewarned, we are forearmed. Excessive rainfall, instead of being one of the disasters of our climate, may be transformed [7] , by forethought and energy, into one of Nature’s best blessings.”

—E. W. H. F.

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[1] selection: A piece of land “selected” by a farmer from areas offered by the Crown.

[2] abated: Slackened.

[3] tropics: Hottest regions of the earth.

[4] condense: Change from vapour into liquid.

[5] miracle: Wonderful event.

[6] debris: Rubbish; fragments.

[7] transformed: Changed.