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It seemed already a little odd to find myself where I could not look out afar over the prairie. The little creek ran bank-full, but clear, and not muddy as our streams now always are after a rain. One of the losses of Iowa through civilization has been the disappearance of our lovely little brooks.
The water of the Sobat is yellowish, and it colours that of the White Nile for a great distance. By dead reckoning I made the Sobat junction 684 miles by river from Khartoum. When I saw the Sobat, in the first week of January 1863, it was bank-full. The current is very powerful, and when I sounded in various places during my former voyage, I found a depth of twenty-six to twenty-eight feet.
For the river was bank-full and still rising indeed, it was feared that an overflow impended. However, there was as yet no break; advices from up the river and down the river told only of extra precautions and constant work to keep the barriers intact against the increasing volume of the stream.
"Most of the year it's only a dry ravine, with high walls; but once in a while there happens to be a tremendous downpour of rain in the mountains, when a heavy cloud breaks against the wall above. When that comes about, this gully is going to be bank-full of roaring, rushing water; and anything caught by the flood is apt to be battered and bruised and drowned before it's swept out below."
I can see him yet, on bitter days, standing alongside the track in a heavy pea-jacket and Napoleon boots, a sealskin cap drawn snugly over his straight black hair, watching, ordering, signaling, while Number One, with its frost-bitten sleepers behind a rotary, tried to buck through ten and twenty-foot cuts which lay bank-full of snow west of McCloud.
Upon this blasted rock, O Sun, behold Our humble prayer for rain and here below A tribute from the thirsty stream, that rolled Bank-full in flood, but now is sunk so low Our old men, tottering, yet may stride acrost And babes run pattering where the wild waves tossed. The grass is dead upon the stem, O Sun! The lizards pant with heat they starve for flies And they for grass and grass for rain!
The outward journey, made partly under cover of darkness, was arduous, for each torrent came roaring down swollen by melting snow almost bank-full, and portions of the trail had been washed away; but we reached the station settlement in safety, and after a few hours' sleep there we turned out to meet the west-bound train.
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