I,
Gaffer Polglaze, be the auldest piece up Drift, but I never heard tell o'
no sich noise, let alone havin' my awn ears flattened wi' it."
They climbed the steep lane to the farm, and the wind began to drown the
more distant roar of the water. Rain fell more heavily than before, and the
full heart of the storm crashed and flamed over their heads as Drift was
reached.
Dawn trembled out upon a tremendous chapter of disasters, still fresh in
the memory of many who witnessed it. A gray, sullen morning, with
sky-glimpses of blue, hastily shown and greedily hidden, broke over Western
Cornwall and uncovered the handiwork of a flood more savage in its fury and
far-reaching in its effects than man's memory could parallel--a flood which
already shrunk fast backward from its own havoc. To describe a single one
of those valleys through which small rivers usually ran to the sea is to
describe them all. Thus the torrent which raved down the coomb beneath
Drift, and carried Uncle Chirgwin's massive hayrick with it like a child's
toy-boat, had also uprooted acres of gooseberry bushes and raspberry canes,
torn apple trees from the ground, laid waste extensive tracts of ripe
produce and carried ripening roots by thousands into the sea. Beneath the
orchards, as the flood subsided, there appeared great tracts of nakedness
where banks of stone had been torn out of the land and scattered upon it;
dead beasts stuck jammed in the low forks of trees; swine, sheep and calves
appeared, cast up in fantastic places, strangled by the water; sandy
wastes, stripped of every living leaf and blade, ran like banks where no
banks formerly existed, and here and there from their midst stuck out naked
boughs of upturned trees, fragments of man's contrivances, or the legs of
dead beasts.
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