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The Land of Little Rain-Part14_Mary Hunter Austin(1868-1934)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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Choose a hill country for storms. There all the business of the

weather is carried on above your horizon and loses its terror in



familiarity. When you come to think about it, the disastrous

storms are on the levels, sea or sand or plains. There you get



only a hint of what is about to happen, the fume of the gods rising

from their meeting place under the rim of the world; and when it



breaks upon you there is no stay nor shelter. The terrible mewings

and mouthings of a Kansas wind have the added terror of



viewlessness. You are lapped in them like uprooted grass; suspect

them of a personal grudge. But the storms of hill countries have



other business. They scoop watercourses, manure the pines, twist

them to a finer fibre, fit the firs to be masts and spars, and, if



you keep reasonably out of the track of their affairs, do you no

harm.



They have habits to be learned, appointed paths, seasons, and

warnings, and they leave you in no doubt about their



performances. One who builds his house on a water scar or the

rubble of a steep slope must take chances. So they did in Overtown



who built in the wash of Argus water, and at Kearsarge at the foot

of a steep, treeless swale. After twenty years Argus water rose in



the wash against the frail houses, and the piled snows of Kearsarge

slid down at a thunder peal over the cabins and the camp, but you



could conceive that it was the fault of neither the water nor the

snow.



The first effect of cloud study is a sense of presence and

intention in storm processes. Weather does not happen. It is the



visible manifestation of the Spirit moving itself in the void. It

gathers itself together under the heavens; rains, snows, yearns



mightily in wind, smiles; and the Weather Bureau, situated

advantageously for that very business, taps the record on his



instruments and going out on the streets denies his God, not having

gathered the sense of what he has seen. Hardly anybody takes



account of the fact that John Muir, who knows more of mountain

storms than any other, is a devout man.



Of the high Sierras choose the neighborhood of the splintered

peaks about the Kern and King's river divide for storm study, or



the short, wide-mouthed canons openingeastward on high valleys.

Days when the hollows are steeped in a warm, winey flood the clouds



came walking on the floor of heaven, flat and pearly gray beneath,

rounded and pearly white above. They gather flock-wise,



moving on the level currents that roll about the peaks, lock hands

and settle with the cooler air, drawing a veil about those places



where they do their work. If their meeting or parting takes place

at sunrise or sunset, as it often does, one gets the splendor of



the apocalypse. There will be cloud pillars miles high,

snow-capped, glorified, and preserving an orderly perspective



before the unbarred door of the sun, or perhaps mere ghosts of

clouds that dance to some pied piper of an unfelt wind. But be it



day or night, once they have settled to their work, one sees from

the valley only the blank wall of their tents stretched along the



ranges. To get the real effect of a mountain storm you must be

inside.



One who goes often into a hill country learns not to say: What

if it should rain? It always does rain somewhere among the peaks:



the unusual thing is that one should escape it. You might suppose

that if you took any account of plant contrivances to save their



pollen powder against showers. Note how many there are

deep-throated and bell-flowered like the pentstemons, how many



have nodding pedicels as the columbine, how many grow in copse

shelters and grow there only. There is keen delight in the quick



showers of summer canons, with the added comfort, born of

experience, of knowing that no harm comes of a wetting at high



altitudes. The day is warm; a white cloud spies over the

canon wall, slips up behind the ridge to cross it by some windy



pass, obscures your sun. Next you hear the rain drum on the

broad-leaved hellebore, and beat down the mimulus beside the brook.



You shelter on the lee of some strong pine with shut-winged

butterflies and merry, fiddling creatures of the wood. Runnels of



rain water from the glacier-slips swirl through the pine needles

into rivulets; the streams froth and rise in their banks. The sky



is white with cloud; the sky is gray with rain; the sky is clear.




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