The Highland monthly - National Library of Scotland

86 The Highland Monthly.
ancient history. Still, in the obliteration of that beautiful
reverence for the Unseen, which discovered the Almighty
in every crisis, and mercy in the greatest of earthly disasters,
has there not passed away a glory from this Northern
Land ?
The wind screamed and the rain fell. Shipwrecks
strewed the eastern coasts, and death pulled down the
blinds in many a Scottish home. Other gales have been
equally dire in their results. Rain was the fascinating
peculiarity of the storm. It was no ordinary downpour of
big, splashing drops, or sheeting onsets.
A cloud of watery vapour seemed to settle over the
country, to be condensed by the superincumbent pressure
of a hundred atmospheres. It defied exclusion by the
common methods of doors, windows, and roofs ; in the most
secure of households it rained within only in lesser degree
than it did without. Driven by the force of the gale, the
mass of saturation was suffocating. Exposed to it on the
bleak hillsides, shepherds were beaten down, gasped, and
died.
All was wet, sadness, disaster and melancholy for two
long weary days in those mountain-girt glens upon which
the brunt of the storm descended.
They fared worst whose dwellings were away down in
the valleys ; where
nature was fairest ; beside brook and
river that for countless summers had lent charm to the
countryside and added tenfold to its fertility. In a few
hours, brooks became raging torrents, the rivers rushing,
devastating seas. In gentle Strathnairn, in the romantic
Findhorn Valley, in classic Strathspey, there was but the
surging and roaring of angry waters on that disastrous
August morning—waters twenty, aye, forty feet high, as
they crashed through the rocky defiles and spread ruin and
death in the plains below. Crops in acres, trees in planta-
tions, cottages in hamlets, whole homesteads vanished
under the avalanche.