Rain

“The rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.”  (Genesis 7:12)

“One does not appreciate the sight of earth until one has traveled through a flood…As we progress up the river, habitations become more frequent but are yet still miles apart.  Nearly all of them are deserted, and the outhouses floated off.  To add to the gloom, almost every living thing seems to have departed, and not a whistle of a bird nor the bark of the squirrel can be heard in this solitude.  Sometimes a morose gar will throw his tail aloft and disappear in the river, but beyond this everything is quiet–the quiet of dissolution.  Down the river floats now a neatly whitewashed henhouse, then a cluster of neatly split fence rails, or a door and a bloated carcass, solemnly guarded by a pair of buzzards, the only bird to be seen, which feast on the carcass as it bears them along.  A picture frame in which there was a cheap lithograph of a soldier on horseback, as it floated on, told of some hearth invaded by the water and despoiled of this ornament.”

(Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi)