The present disposition of the colony government is to provide as much additional land and water as it can, and let the if’s fall where they may. To that end, it has spent about $60 million on reclamation and $55 million to increase its water supply since World War II. Over the next decade, its further expenditures in these two areas may reach $300 million. Many projects have not yet been authorized, but much of the preliminary surveying has been done. With the need for them becoming more imperative as the colony’s population continues to increase, it is not so much a question of if as of when. Allocation of several hundred million dollars to correct deficiencies of the topography is none too large for the job that must be done. When one has noted that Hong Kong has a sheltered deep-water harbor (probably the bed of an old river that flowed from west to east), that one-seventh of its land is arable, and that its mines and quarries yield a modest amount of iron ore, building stone, kaolin clay, graphite, lead, wolfram and a few other minerals, one has exhausted the list of its terrestrial assets. Its liabilities are unlimited. Three broken lines of perpendicular hills cut across the colony from northeast to southwest, with irregular spurs branching off haphazardly; two dozen peaks poke up from 1,000 to 3,140 feet. Eighty percent of the surface is either too steep for roads or buildings, too barren to grow anything but wiry grass or scrub, too swampy to walk through or so hacked up by erosion that it is worthless and an eyesore. The rest, except for farmland, is either in forest or packed with people in numbers ranging from 1,800 to 2,800 an acre. Rivers tumble from the high hills in all directions, but they are short and unreliable, mostly summer torrents and winter trickles. Hong Kong’s weather is impartially disrespectful toward annual averages, periodic tables and the population. Rainfall averages about 85 inches a year, with the rainy season extending from April through September. There have been long summer droughts and ruinous winter floods. On July 19, 1926, it rained nearly 4 inches in one hour and 21 inches in 24 hours.