Natural history -- Outdoor books; Nature; Nature study; Paris (France) -- Description and travel
But after ten the thing was different; by that time the hot reaper's
sun had warmed the surface of the open water on which the rays fell
almost from the moment the sun rose. Towards eleven o'clock the
difference in temperature was marked; but those who then came to bathe,
walking along the shore or rowing, dipped their hands in and found the
water warm, and anticipated that it would be equally so at the
bathing-place. So it was at the surface, for the warm water had begun
to flow in, and the cold water out, rather deeper, setting up, in fact,
an exact copy of the current of the ocean, the shadowed part by the
copse representing the Polar area. Directly any one began to swim he
found the difference, the legs went down into cold water, and in many
cases cramp ensued with alarming results and danger. Down to the chest
it was warm, quite warm, while the feet were very cold. Not much
imagination is needed to conceive the effect on persons not used to
rough bathing, and even a strong man might suffer. People insisted that
these chills and cramps were caused by cold springs rising at the
bottom, and could not be argued out of that belief. As a matter of fact
there was not a single spring over the whole extent of the bottom. That
part in particular was often dry, not from dry weather, but as the
water of the pond was drawn away. Let it rain as much as it would, no
spring ever broke up there. The cold currents were produced by the
shadow of the copse, and, had the trees been felled, would have
disappeared. That would have been like letting the sun of the Equator
shine on the Polar seas.
After a storm of wind the lee shore was marked with a dark-green line
of weeds and horse-tails, torn up and drifted across, which had been
thrown up by the little breakers beyond the usual level of the water. A
mass of other weeds and horse-tails, boughs and leaves, remained
floating; and now was seen a reversal of the habits of fishes. Every
one knows that fishes seek the windward shore in a breeze for the
insects blown in; but now, while the gale, though subsiding, still
rippled the water, the best place to fish was on the lee shore, just at
the edge of the drifted weeds. Various insects probably were there
washed away from the green raft to which they had clung. The water
being often lowered by drawing hatches, the level changed frequently;
and as storms of wind happened at different levels, so there were
several little raised beaches showing where the level had been, formed
of washed gravel and stones--the counterpart, in fact, of the raised
beaches of the geologists. When the water was almost all drawn off,
then there was a deep winding channel in the mud of the bottom, along
which trickled a little streamlet which fed the pond. The sun hardening
the mud, it was possible by-and-by to walk to the edge of the channel,
where it could be seen that the streamlet ran five or six feet deep
between precipitous banks of mud.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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