334 CONCLUSION, 



were once vineyards and cornfields, and of little piles of gaily-painted boards, 

 once forming portions of summer-liouses. The town wall itself, a solid 

 line of concrete, has in one place been thrown down quite flat, and a little 

 further on two great beams, at least 30 ft. long, have completely barred one 

 of the gateways. Nothing, however, shows the force of the flood so much 

 as the ruins of the suspension bridge. Nearly half the bridge itself has 

 been firmly and securely laid by the water on the bank, where, indeed, I at 

 firai mistook it for a landing stage. Only one bridge is now standing— 

 viz., the old stone one at St Pierre. Had it been carried away, the losses 

 0.^ the St Cyprien side would have been even more terrible than they were." 



Below Toulouse, between that city and Agen, the Garonne receives the 

 waters of the Tarn, coming from the department of Loz^re and the moun- 

 tains to the south, and along the course of this river there were similar 

 devastations. At Mount-Auban the water rose 40 inches above what it did 

 in 1835, which was the highest flood of the century, and all the farms 

 around were destroyed. At Moissac, near Mount-Auban, the destruc- 

 tion was fearful, and the river was found to have definitively forsaken its 

 former bed, and to flow four kilometres away in an ancient channeL Castel- 

 Sarrasin, between the Tarn and the Garonne, was gutted entirely, and the 

 number of victims was supposed to be about a hundred ; and similar were 

 the accounts which flowed in from all parts of the devasi;ated region. Evei-y- 

 where were dead bodies being found, or seen drifting down the stream. 



Below Agen the Garonne receives the waters of the Lot, coming from the 

 northern part of Loz^re, and the district between the Tarn and the Lot had 

 the same tale to tell. 



At Bordeaux the river was not overflowed, but it brought down trees, 

 hay, animals, and several dead bodies. An incident more touching than 

 terrible occurred. An infant in a cradle, supposed to have come some dis- 

 tance, and floating down towards the sea, was saved. 



Such was the inundation of the valley of the Garonne. I have spoken of 

 it as a form of the evil which it is sought to remedy with which the inhabi- 

 tants of newly-settled lands are more familiar than they are with the form 

 of the evil in the mountains for which rehoisement and gazonnement were 

 primarily employed as remedial measures. Illustrations crowd upon me. 

 I confine myself to a selection from those supplied by the history of the 

 Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, being with them well acquainted. 



Captain Hall, in his Manual of South African Geography, says (p. 95), — 

 "In Great and Little Namaqualand, the Kalihari Desert, and the whole of 

 the regioj. situ ated on the southern slope of the Nieuweveld and Eoggeveld 

 Mountains, whole years may elapse without the phenomenon of a running 

 stream, and yet the magnitude of the dry water-courses of the Bufi'alo, 

 Hartebeest, and Gup or Borradaile Eiver, aU tributaries of the Orange, show 

 how imn ense must be the torrents that sometimes sweep along them. 

 The write of this has seen the bed of the Great Fish Kiver perfectly dry, 

 and with'n twenty-four hours a torrent thirty feet deep and several bundled 

 feet wide was roaring through it. In February 1848 the Kat River sud- 

 de ily rose upwards of fifty feet in the course of a few hours, sweeping 

 se ^euteen feet above the roadway of a stone bridge at Fort Beaufort, 

 suoposed to have been built high enough to leave a clear waterway to the 

 highest flood ever before remembered. The Gamtoos, Gauritz, and all the 

 other rivers draining the Karroo, are also subject to very sudden rises, 



