And burst the curb and bounded,
Rejoicing to be free,
And whirling down in fierce career
Battlement and plank and pier,
Rushed headlong to the sea.
Battlement and plank and pier were in this case represented by hut slabs and rafters, haystacks and pumpkins, from the arable lands and meadows through which the great river held its upper course; while drowned stock and the posts and rails of many a mile of submerged fencing represented the latter floating trifles. There was much that was grand in the steadily deepening, broadening tide which slowly and remorselessly crawled over the wide green flats, which undermined the great waterworn precipices of the red-clayed bluffs, bringing down enormous fragments and masses, many tons in weight, which fell, foamed, and disappeared in the turbid, hurrying wave. Who could have recognised in this fierce, swollen, tyrant river, yellow as the Tiber, broad as the Danube, resistless as Ocean, the shallow, pellucid streamlet, rippling over its sandy shallows, of the dead, bygone famine year?
On the larger flats it was miles wide. The white, straight tree-trunks stood like colonnades with arches framed in foliage, disappearing in endless perspective above a limitless plain of gliding waters.
By night, as Mr. Neuchamp awoke in his cottage, which was built upon an elevation said by tradition to be above the reach of floods, the ‘remorseless dash of billows’ sounded distinctly, unpleasantly close in the darkness.
On the following day, the flood still continuing to rise, Piambook was despatched to the Back Lake to report, and upon his return stated that ‘water yan along that one picaninny blind creek like it Murray, make haste longer Outer Lake.’ Full of hope and expectant of triumph, Mr. Neuchamp started out for ‘Lake country,’ accompanied by Mr. Banks.
When they arrived at the first lake the unusual fulness and volume of the water in that reservoir showed that the main stream must have been forced outwards along the course of the ancient, natural channel, by which in years of exceptional high floods—and in those years only—the lake had been filled.