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Joan spent many long days in the house at this time and practiced an unskillful needle, while her thoughts wandered far and near through the sullen weather to this old cross and that. Then came a night of rainless darkness through which past augmentations of water still thundered.
It is a season of uneasy winds, and of strange, rainless storms, which perplex the fishermen, and indicate rough weather out at sea. As the house trembles and the windows rattle, we turn towards the fire with a feeling of safety. Representing the fiercest of all dangers, it yet expresses security and comfort.
The rainless regions, not deserts, are parts of Guatemala, the table-land of Mexico, the Peruvian coast, parts of Morocco, Egypt, Arabia, Persia, etc. The electric character of the air is another subject of interest, and a leading one in Meteorology. What can be more magnificent, what more awful, than those storms of lightning and thunder which are witnessed sometimes even in our own latitudes?
Its source was a mystery, and its annual rise in its rainless valley was so beneficent, that it was given the worship which belonged to the Divine alone. All the hope of the harvest depended on its annual overflow. It moistened and fertilized and prepared the ground, and then receded until the harvest was grown and gathered.
It was not yet dark, but all the city lamps were lighted, and the East Side had that atmosphere of care-free gaiety habitual to it after business hours when the weather is rainless and warm. The taxicab moved slowly, because the children had overflowed the sidewalks and played games which kept them in blissful danger of their lives. Twice the taxi stopped.
Brockhurst House had slumbered all day long in the steady warmth of the July sun. The last three weeks had been rainless, so that the short turf of the uplands began to grow crisp and discoloured, while the resinous scent of the fir forest, at once stimulating and soothing, was carried afar out over the sloping corn-fields and low-lying pastures.
Alone, as I believed him to be, and in that new country on the very verge of civilization, he was hardly an antagonist I needed greatly to fear. Indeed, as man to man, I rather welcomed an encounter. There is little to record, either of the day or the night. The latter shut down dark, but rainless, although the sky was heavily overcast by clouds.
But the town on the banks of the Colorado, in an almost rainless land, had little to build upon. Still on the street mingled the old-timers from desert, mountain and plain; from prospecting trip, mine or ranch; the adventurer, the promoter, the Indian, the Mexican, the frontier business man and the tourist.
The Arabs call the strait Babelmandeb, that is, the "Gate of Tears," because of the number of vessels which have been wrecked here in the endeavor to enter from the open sea. Aden lies within the rainless zone, so that sometimes the inhabitants see no rainfall for three years together.
There it towered up, the wonder of the world, its white roof bright against the rainless blue; and beyond it, among the ridges and pediments of noble buildings, a broad glimpse of the bright blue sea.
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