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Updated: May 6, 2025
On the eastern borderland the Nile pours a mighty flood, winding a sinuous passage along its self-made flood-plain, the Egypt of history. In the west the Niger has forced its way into the confines of the desert and then, as if rebuffed, turns its course southward. This great domain of the simoom has every diversity of surface.
So long as there were great areas of unrestricted flood-plain above Vicksburg to impound the freshets and lower their crests, the levees below required no great height or strength; but the tasks of reclamation were at best arduous enough to make rapid expansion depend upon the spur of great expectations.
The sun was just above the tops of the trees on the western ridge and long rays of slanting light came pink across the river flood-plain, investing the tree-tops by the shore with a soft and radiant light. Suddenly there came a plaintive little note from the bottom of a near-by tree, instantly recognized as a new note in the winter woods.
Now and then there is a little flood-plain, on which we can walk, and we cross and recross the stream and wade along the channel where the water is so swift as almost to carry us off our feet and we are in danger every moment of being swept down, until night comes on.
FLOOD PLAINS CHARACTERISTIC OF MATURE RIVERS. On reaching grade a stream planes a flat floor for its continually widening valley. Ever cutting on the outer bank of its curves, it deposits on the inner bank scroll-like flood-plain patches.
Now this broad valley canyon, or "box canyon," as such channels are usually called in the country, has been formed by the stream itself, cutting its channel at first vertically and afterwards laterally, and so a great flood-plain is formed. For a day we ride up the Paria, and next day return. The party in camp have made good progress.
Tall wild rice and wild rye grow on the flood-plain and by the streams where the tall buttercups shine like bits of gold and the blackbirds have their home; bushy blue stem on the prairies and in the open woods where the golden squaw weed and the wild geranium make charming patterns of yellow and pink and purple and some of the painted cup left over from May still glows like spots of scarlet rain; tall grama grass on the dry prairies and gravelly knolls, whitened by the small spurge and yellowed by the creeping cinquefoil; nodding fescue in the sterile soils where the robin's plantain and the sheep sorrel have succeeded the early everlasting; satin grasses in the moist soil of the open woodlands where the fine white flowers of the Canada anemone blow, and slough grass in the marshy meadows where the white-crossed flowers of the sharp spring are fading, and the woolly stem of the bitter boneset is lengthening; reed grass and floating manna grass in the swamps where the broad arrow leaves of the sagittaria fringe the shore and the floating leaves and fragrant blossoms of the water lilies adorn the pond.
"Way up the river." "If I should call the bottom land a flood-plain," said Uncle Robert, "would you know why?" "Oh, I know," said Donald. "Because the water covers it when there is a flood." "Now what made that flood-plain?" "Wasn't it always there?" "No," said Uncle Robert. "The river made it." "How could the river make the flood-plain?" asked Susie.
Finding a little patch of flood-plain, on which there is a huge pile of driftwood and a clump of box-elders, and near by a mammoth stream bursting from the rocks, we soon have a huge fire. Our clothes are spread to dry; we make a cup of coffee, take out our bread and cheese and dried beef, and enjoy a hearty supper. We estimate that we have traveled eight miles to-day.
Entering this, we have to wade upstream; often the water fills the entire channel and, although we travel many miles, we find no flood-plain, talus, or broken piles of rock at the foot of the cliff.
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