Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/98

 neighbouring fire. Fortunately the hot winds are rare, occurring only in the summer, and then only for one, two, or at most three days; lulling at night, and raging again in the forenoon.

In the interior, if a fire occurs simultaneously with a hot wind, and the growth of grass has been abundant in the spring, the devastation is as vast as it is rapid. The raging wind sweeps up the kindled grass, whirls it forward to set the fire-demon at work in countless fresh places, and amid the roar of the wind, the crackling of boughs and grass, the dense and lurid smoke, the settler sometimes vainly strives to save his homestead from the advancing flames.

One hot wind day is notable in the annals of Victoria as Black Thursday. The air was darkened with gloom which terrified; the captain of a ship in Bass's Straits lowered his top-gallant masts in expectation of some terrible convulsion, when at two o'clock in the day it was dark as midnight. It was not till Friday morning that the darkness waned.

In a prolonged drought the "heaven is as iron and the earth as brass." What the colonists call "the break-up of a drought" is welcome as spring in cloudy Europe. During the drought a tantalizing but common phenomenon is the massing of dark, rain-promising clouds. The settler eyes them with hope, and just as he expects their blessings a wind-storm rives them into thinness, and they gradually disappear, leaving no wrack behind. The end of a drought, after numerous disappointments, is generally sudden. The evening may have been fine; in the morning the rain is descending in torrents. One severe drought, in which thousands of sheep and cattle had perished, and many more had been driven to fresh pastures to save their lives, was thus broken up. For nearly seven days and nights, almost without intermission the flood-gates were opened. The rivers rose to unexampled height. Many lives were lost. The Nammoy river carried away to the far south the wrecks of buildings and the carcases of sheep. There were instances in which all animals left alive by the drought were torn from their owner by the flood. When the affluents of the Darling escape from the cordillera, they