Landtakers: The Story of an Epoch

The rainy season started in earnest, and they had something else to worry about. Every day it rained, without once letting up for a month. Marble masses of cloud rolled down from the north-east and cracked open against the ranges. The rain hissed in the trees like water on fire, ripped the tough leaves of the staghorns to shreds, and curtained the world into a leaden twilight. Then the sun broke through for a few hours with pent-up midsummer heat. Wreaths of steam wavered over the sodden ground. Boots left out to dry overnight were covered with mildew in the morning, and gun barrels had a coating of rust a few hours after they were cleaned. Gaudy fungi sprouted from the bark walls of the humpies, which were furred with green slime. The roofs, shrunk by the long dry season, and the green beams which supported them swelled and twisted and leaked at every joint, and the ant-bed floor came up in clods of grey mud on the men's boots. Their clothes were never dry. When a man put his blankets out in the fugitive sunlight the blowflies laid on them.

The valley became a vast lake cut in two by the yellow waters of the river, which had risen to the top of its banks and roared past with trees torn, roots and all, from the earth. Where the ground had been hard as iron it sucked a man down to his knees now. To ride was out of the question. Cabell, keeping an eye on his cattle, floundered about in mud and water from dawn till dusk, leading his plunging, sweating horse through the morass to the high sandy places where instinctively the cattle had made their camps. In the vapour-packed sunlight he gasped for air. The sweat never dried on him. He came in at night, gobbled a mouthful of food, and flung himself down as he was, in mud-drenched clothes.