350 OONOLUSION. 



runlets over a granite soil, which absorbs nothing, to the larger streams which 

 fill the two rivers which unite a short distance from Toulouse into the Garonne, 

 and make the prosperity of the rich surrounding plain. When, however, 

 from any cause, the snow melts too rapidly, as is believed to have occurred 

 this year, the heat and rainfall having been both unusually great, and 

 lasting for three weeks on end, the channels cannot convey the water, 

 which rushes in broad torrents to the streams, which again, owing to some 

 configuration of the soil, cannot convey away the unwonted mass of fluid. 

 The water collects into a lake, sometimes miles in length and breadth, and 

 forty feet deep, a veritable reservoir, and then bursts through the open 

 mouths left by the rivers into the valley of the Garonne, with as resistless a 

 force as the great Sheffield reservoir burst into the little vale below it. 

 The Garonne fills and fills until it overtops its lower bank, and then, as the 

 supply increases hourly, its sweep over the lower ground becomes as re- 

 sistless as that of a slow storm wave. The efiect is not quite so severe 

 because of its gradual approach ; but the Garonne must have rushed over 

 St Cyprien, bringing a mass of water equal to that embraced in a reservoir 

 twenty miles long, by ten miles wide and thirty-eight feet deep. This year 

 heat, rainfall, and wind seem to have united, and on June 23rd the Garonne 

 was filled in an hour, and in sis hours the upper valley had been turned 

 into a bursting lake, and a flood which, like an earthquake, makes its victims 

 think the laws of nature overturned, and that there is no help even in 

 heaven, came rushing towards the city. Within six hours of the first 

 alarm of an unusual rise in the water, the Garonne had swept away every 

 bridge of Toulouse except one, the old stone bridge of St John, and 

 flowing on in an unbroken rush into St Cyprien, rose above the streets so 

 rapidly that the terrified inhabitants were compelled to take tefuge in the 

 upper stories. Scores of persons appear to have been strangled by the 

 flood, all the slaughterers in the great abattoir, for example, being killed at 

 once ; but the great loss of life arose from another cause, which recalled the 

 idea of earthquake to the wretched people. The rushing water felled the 

 weaker houses as giant shells would have done, and undermining the found- 

 ations of the stronger, till through one entire night houses were toppling 

 as in an earthquake, and the awful scenes at and around Cucuta, in New 

 Granada, on May 18th, when 16,000 persons perished at once by earth- 

 quake, were repeated in Lanquedoo. Escape of the house, once shook, was 

 of course hopeless. There were the walls above and the waters below, and 

 the stream outside in which a boat could scarcely live. Nearly 1000 

 persons are known to have been killed in St Cyprien alone by the falling 

 houses, trees, and monuments, or to have been drowned in escaping from 

 the upper stories, or capsized in boats which put out into the streets to 

 rescue the sufferers, sometimes — to the credit of human nature be it spoken, 

 if not of human reason — with a priest on board to grant absolution to the 

 dying as they swept past. The villages beyond Toulouse, and presumable 

 on lower ground, were in some instances swept away bodily, the church in 

 one instance being the only building left standing, and in another a mill so 

 injured that it must be blown up. The ravages extended over 100 miles, 

 and at one time fears were entertained for Bourdeaux itself. The destruc- 

 tion of property is, of course, greater than that of life. Neither vineyards 

 nor houses can run away. The quarter of St Cpyrien, with its 30,000 people, 

 had, in the words of the official report, " ceased to exist," and its whole popu- 

 lation is houseless, without furniture, clothes, or food. In St Cyprien and 



