62 MODERN FOREST ECONOMY. 



herself in the branches of a fig-tree from the falling ruins 

 of the house had held out the whole night ; here the 

 father, who had spent the night in the house of his absent 

 master, found in the morning but one child remaining, 

 who had climbed upon a beam for safety. In another 

 house the father sought safety in a mulberry tree, which 

 still towers over the ruins in the courtyard ; 20 paces off 

 is the fig tree which saved his children, and at a five 

 minutes' walk on the banks of a deep canal, which brings 

 the waters of the Segura into the plain, is the trembling 

 reed to which the mother clung, until almost unconscious 

 she was rescued, 



' The force of the water is beyond all description. Great 

 heavy millstones were carried away to a distance of many 

 yards. A noria, one of the heavy ancient water-wheels 

 which have descended from the times of the Moors, exactly 

 alike in form to those used in Egypt thousands of years 

 ago for irrigation, was carried to a distance of fifty feet 

 without being destroyed. In Pedro's house the whole 

 yard was filled with mud, so that he had to dig deep 

 passages in the earth in order to find his plough. The 

 mulea and donkeys had literally to be dug out of the 

 sand in which they were half buried in their very stable, 

 which fortunately lay high. It was half sad half comical 

 to hear his description of how, as the waters rose, he bored 

 a hole in the wall so as to be able to reach the hay-loft, 

 and how his children, and even his corpulent better-half, 

 clambered up and crept through, for " nothing is impossible 

 in such a case of need." He at least had no death to 

 lament in his own family, though he had lost a sister- 

 in-law. 



' Thus we reached Nonduermas. Had this village but 

 remembered its name, " Sleep not," better on that fatal 

 night 1 But ruin broke in on it like a flash of lightning 

 with the rushing stream which here broke through the 

 railway dam for the second time, and threw a large piece 

 of it down, dashed against the brick houses, and cast one 

 after another to the earth. The streets of the village are 



