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"If I was to tell you what was about to occur, your hair would stand on end, and you would rush forth shrieking with terror amid the raging tempest. The future I see looming, and not far off. Bloodshed and destruction, fierce conflagrations, war, famines and miseries unspeakable, the graveyard overflowing, the country depopulated.
What good is it ever agoing to do you, to pretend to tell what sort of weather we'll get next week, when it's only a guess after all? Better make a change, and predict famines and such things, so we can take the alarm, and buy out some country grocery." Giraffe had not one word to say in reply.
The time of expectation was full of anxieties; plagues, famines, and divers accidents which then took place in divers quarters, were an additional aggravation; the churches were crowded; penances, offerings, absolutions, all the forms of invocation and repentance multiplied rapidly; a multitude of souls, in submission or terror, prepared to appear before their Judge. And after what catastrophes?
But there is yet another result from this truly far-reaching measure, as Sir David Barbour justly calls it, which to my mind is the most important of all the bearing of it on famines; for we all know that the population is rapidly increasing, and that of all apprehensions which haunt the minds of those responsible for the safety of India, those as regard famines are by far the greatest.
Old stories of occurrences handed down by tradition, but scantily confirmed by experience, suddenly ceased to be incredible; there were earthquakes of unparalleled extent and violence; eclipses of the sun occurred with a frequency unrecorded in previous history; there were great droughts in sundry places and consequent famines, and that most calamitous and awfully fatal visitation, the plague.
In the following pages I hope among other things to be able to cast some rays of light into this valley of the shadow of debt, if not of death. Any review of Darkest India would be incomplete without some mention of the widespread and calamitous famines which periodically devastate the country and which reappear from time to time with terrible certainty.
Not that I should call'n maister by rights, for his father growed up side by side with me, as if one mother had twinned us and been our nourishing." "I s'pose your memory can reach a long way back into history, Mr. Creedle?" "Oh yes. Ancient days, when there was battles and famines and hang-fairs and other pomps, seem to me as yesterday.
Without it, the most densely populated regions of modern Europe and America must retain their primitive, sparsely inhabited, agricultural or pastoral condition; it is the foundation of our wealth and the condition of our safety from submergence by another flood of barbarous hordes; it is the bond which unites into a solid political whole, regions larger than any empire of antiquity; it secures us from the recurrence of the pestilences and famines of former times; it is the source of endless comforts and conveniences, which are not mere luxuries, but conduce to physical and moral well-being.
I wonder if they ever tried to make him good by being kind to him! I've read and read, but I can't find they used anything on him but plagues and famines and boils and pestilences and thunder and hail and fire! Have I got a middle name, Aunt Boynton, for I don't like Rod very much?" "I never heard that you had a middle name; you must ask Ivory," said his aunt abstractedly.
It is an interesting fact that the monsoon currents which cross the Indian Ocean from South Africa continue on their course through Australia after visiting India, and recent famines in the latter country have coincided with the droughts which caused much injury to stock in the former.
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