In February 1912 we were living in a modern house in a low-lying part of Seville, some little way from the river. The ground floor of the house had been artificially raised about five feet above the level of the street, but if the river had risen two or three inches above the twenty-seven feet that it had reached the night before it began to go down, the whole street would quickly have been flooded, and we, like Triana, would have had to be fed by boat. All that night a violent thunderstorm raged, to add the finishing touch to our panic; for there was nothing now between Seville and the river save some improvised barriers hastily erected with sixty hours of incessant labour by the soldiers of the garrison, and against these the water was already streaming with force.
But our case, though serious enough, was nothing like so critical as that of many others, for it was at any rate not likely that the water would actually come into our house. A friend of mine, like scores of residents in Seville, has in her house a well of brackish water, and all these wells are fed in some way from the river bed. My friend knows that it is only the walls of the new wharves, built during the last twenty years or so, that keeps her well from overflowing whenever the river rises even a few feet. And once the wells in that part of the town overflow from the river, nothing can check the ingress of the water, for the whole district lies far below flood-level. Day and night for a week she kept on taking soundings, until during the last night, that of the thunderstorm, the water in the well at last began to rise, one metre ... two metres ... three metres.... By daybreak, notwithstanding all her prayers and vows to the Virgin, it was within six feet of the top, and was still rising rapidly.
“And then,” said she, “at the last moment Our Lady answered my prayers.”
The storm ceased, the sun came out, and before the tide turned at midday the flag was flying on the Torre del Oro to tell panic-stricken Seville that the river was going down. Indeed the change came only just in time, for the flood was within an ace of overlapping the frail temporary barriers which alone kept the water out of the main part of the town.