Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/815

Rh fill their water barrels by means of rain sails, but not one drop for the parched plantations of the tree-destroyer.

Less easy to explain is the mania for cloud bursts which in certain years seems to seize the climate, both of eastern Cuba and northern Santo Domingo. As a rule, the rainy season begins about the middle of June and continues till late in September or that part of October when lucky Colon realized the dream of his life, and for the next ten weeks had cause to consider the climate superior to that of the Andalusian garden lands. But there are summers when the American colonists hesitate to aggravate the temperature of the national holiday with fireworks, and when heretics and true believers have to combine their prayers for showers enough to save the pineapple harvest.

In such years droughts or dryish sultry weather may continue to the end of July, but before the middle of August Nature evinces a disposition to make up for lost time, and monstrous thundershowers occur day after day, till the roar of the sierra brooks can be heard from a distance of several miles. And the land's appetite for these potations appears to grow with every indulgence. The first sensation of drowning is said to be pleasant, rather than otherwise, but that rule admits of an exception in the case of a wanderer caught in a Cuban chorasso and feeling his influenza-resisting ability yield to the persistence of the merciless shower bath till the remains of his vital vigor flicker on the verge of extinction. Yet, during the intervals of these celestial waterfalls the atmospheric condition may not appreciably differ from those of other year*; the same cool nights, the same mist-dispersing land winds and balmy mornings; warm but breezy forenoons, the cooling sea wind subsiding about 11 ; then clouds and boding thunder growls. At 2 the thermometer may indicate 95° in the shade; the exact average of normal years at that time of a summer day; but again the extravasation of moisture, which, according to the rule of averages ought to be limited to a good, brisk shower, will come in the form of a deluge. After four or five weeks of such excesses the weather does begin to recover its temper, and a peculiar cool vapor, hovering about the drenched woodlands, seems to counteract the formation of waterfall clouds, the noonday hours still grow sultry, and thunder mutters its warnings on general principles; but the natives decline to stampede; experience has taught them that the wrath of Nature has been propitiated, and that the peril of atmospheric dam-breaks is over for that year.

Torrent summers occur about once in four years, and while they last the discomforts of travel in the interior of Cuba can hardly be exaggerated. The railroads of the coast plain have become bayous,