One can imagine the scene.  Ararat, a muddy pyramid dotted here and there with olive trees—­curious, by the way, to find olives so high!—­in the receding waters the vagrant raven cheerfully picking out the eye of a defunct pterodactyl.  The heavy clouds rolling off the sodden world—­they must have indeed been heavy clouds, nimbus of the first water—­as they had raised the world’s water-level 250 feet per day during “the flood” ... surely a record output!

The primeval family party, sadly poking about along the expanding margin of the world, noting how Abel Brown’s tall chimney was beginning to show, and how Cain Jones’ wigwam was clean gone.  Mrs. Shem said she knew it would, the mortar work had been so terribly scamped.

And Naboth Robinson’s vineyard—­well, it was in a pretty mess, to be sure, and serve him right, for Mrs. Noah had frequently offered him two of her (second) best milch mammoths for it; yet he had held on to his nasty sour grapes, like the mean old curmudgeon that he was.

And now Hammy must set to work and tidy it up; and oh! what lots of nice manure was floating about, all for nothing the cartload ...  And so the primeval family felt better, and went back to the ark to tea, feeling almost cheerful, but rather lonesome.

Fortunately this great flood did little injury to life or limb.  A certain amount of destruction of crops and other property was inevitable, but on the whole the loss was not so great as was at one time feared, and much was saved that at first seemed irreparable.

A well-known lady artist came near to giving the note of tragedy to the British community, and losing the number of her mess (to use a nautical, and therefore appropriate expression) by reason of a big willow tree, beneath whose shady boughs she had moored her floating studio.  This hapless tree, having all its sustenance swept from beneath by the greedy water, came down with a crash in the night upon the confiding house-boat, and all but swamped it.

The cook-boat, occupied as usual by a pair of prolific Mangis and their large small family, was saved by the proverbial “acid drop”—­the children crawling out somehow or anyhow from among the branches of the fallen tree.

The fair artist, having with shrieks invoked the aid of a neighbour, he promptly descended from his roof or other temporary camp, and helped her with basins and chatties to bale out the half-swamped boat.  The lady is now safely moored to the mudbank on the other side of the river where willow trees do not grow.

The whole bund is in a very unsafe state:  it was raised three feet after the last flood, but its width was not increased correspondingly.  Now that the water has fallen, great fissures and subsidences have appeared, and in many places large portions of the bank have fallen away, carrying big trees with them.

[1] Our pet name for Shikari Mark II., who reigns in the stead of Ahmed
    Bot, sacked for expensive inefficiency.