Thus Mr. Charles Banks, jubilantly prophetic, with the elasticity of youth, having thrown off at one effort all the annoyance and privation of the famine year, was fully prepared for an epoch of marvels and general prosperity.
The day ended as it had commenced. There was not a moment’s cessation from the soaking, pouring, saturating, dripping downpour of heaven’s precious rain. ‘As the shower upon the mown grass,’ saith the olden Scripture of the day of David the King. Doubtless the great City of Palaces was erst surrounded by shaven lawns, by irrigated fields and gardens. But on the skirts of the far-stretching yellow deserts, tenanted then as now by the wild tribes, to whom pasture for their camels and asses, and horses and sheep, was as the life-blood of their veins, doubtless there were thousands of leagues all barren, baked sterility, until the long-desired rain set in, when, as if by magic, herbs and waving grains and flowerets fair sprang up, and rejoiced the hearts of the tribe, from the silver-bearded sheik to the laughing child.
So it would be at Rainbar. Ernest knew this from many a conversation which he had had upon the subject with Jack Windsor and Charley Banks. In this warm, dry-soiled country, the growth of pasture under favourable circumstances is well-nigh incredible. Nature adapts herself to the most widely differing conditions of existence with amazing fertility of resource. In more temperate zones the partial heat which withers the flower and the green herb when cut down, slays the plant and destroys germination in the seed for evermore. Here, in the wild waste, when the fierce and burning blast revels over scorched brown prairies, and the whirlwind and the sand column dance together over heated sands, the plant life is well and truly adapted to the strange soil, the stranger clime. The tall grasses grow hard and gray, or faint yellow, under the daily desiccation which spares no tender growth; but they remain nutritive and life-sustaining for an incredible period, if but the necessary cloud water can be supplied at long intervals. Then the hard-pushed pastoral colonist, when he found that his flocks had bared to famine pitch the pastures within reach of the watercourses, which were his sole dependence in the earlier days, was compelled to resort to the most ancient practice of well-digging, of which he might have gained the idea from the familiar records of a hard-set pastoral people in the sandy wastes of Judea. Receding to the wide plains and waterless forests of the vast region which lay cruelly distant from any known stream or fountain, which was in summer regularly abandoned by the aboriginal denizens of the land, he sank, at much expense, wells of great depth—at first with uncertain result; but, though much of the water thus painfully obtained—for from three to five hundred pounds for two to three hundred feet sinking was no uncommon expense in a single well—was brackish, much salt, still progress was made. The stock was enabled in the midst of summer heat or protracted autumn drought to feed upon these previously locked-up pastures, upon the saline herbs and plants, the nutritious, aromatic shrubs peculiar to this land, where no white man had ever before seen stock except in winter.