Word: rains
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Formosa. When Clerk Tsai Yung-ting awoke at 2 a.m., the rain had been falling for hours on the sleeping coastal village of Houlung. Too late, he rushed down to the sea wall-to find the dike watchmen asleep and the water pouring through. By the time he got back to rouse the sleeping village, the torrent was already waisthigh. That night Tsai and 29 others of Houlung's 100 people died...
Most of Formosa's 10 million population are clustered along the island's western coastal plains, in the shadow of mountain ranges from which streams fall precipitously and fan out through dike-guarded channels. The rains started first in the north. Later, in the central part of the island, a record 40 inches of rain fell onto the rocky hills, then raced down in torrents that carried tumbling rocks the size of pumpkins along with them to batter dikes on the plain below. Changhua, a city of 70,000 people, was inundated. At one village near...
...joined the chute. It draped over me like a sheet, and I was afraid that when I blossomed again, I'd be tangled in the shrouds and risers. But I wasn't, thank God. At last, I realized I was getting warmer. The air was smooth. And rain was falling on me. I figured I was down to 300 or 500 feet. I told myself, 'All I have to do now is make a good landing...
...Australian aborigines wear practically no clothes, grow no crops, live by hunting and berry picking. Their major art consists of rock pictures of spirits called Wondjina. First painted centuries ago, the paintings are "touched" (i.e., repainted) by the natives each season to bring on the rain. But at Munich's Ethnographical Museum last week hung copies of a much older and almost unknown aboriginal art. discovered by the museum director, Andreas Lommel, in the Kimberley district of Northwestern Australia. Smaller, more naturalistic and far more elegant than Wondjina art, they date back at least a thousand years...
Lommel found the ancient pictures in the hills surrounding a vast ranch far out in the bush. In the outback country he found a shifting population of aborigines. The old people led him along circuitous trails to their usual Wondjina pictures, and "touched" them for him (Lommel swears the rain came each time). But forging farther afield himself, Lommel came to other rock drawings the natives themselves had never seen, and knew nothing about...