So far the peasants of Orissa are not worse off than other people who have to live at the mercy of landowners. Their special hardship comes from the nature of the country and from “visitations of God,” as they are called; though why God’s visitations are regarded only as evil it is difficult to understand. Looking inland from the coast, one can see the beginning of mountain ranges running far into the interior, and it is there that the Tributary Chiefs and Rajahs have their territories, there that hill-tribes live, and wandering elephants abound. But between the mountains and the sea lies a broad belt of alluvial plain. It is under British control, but permeated by uncertain and changeable rivers that issue like wild animals from the mountains and refuse control of any kind. Such rivers are the Byturni, a sacred stream, where millions of pilgrims bathe on their way down the Grand Trunk Road to the shrine of Juggernath; the Brahmani, also sacred as its name denotes, but the chief cause of the present profane disasters; and the Mahanadi, which threatens the old capital city of Cuttack, and is sometimes a desert of sand, sometimes a sea. In August rain had fallen on the mountains for fifteen days and nights without ceasing. Foot by foot the water in the sacred rivers rose. The islands disappeared, the broad miles of sand disappeared, the water reached the edge of the steep mud banks. Forty years before it had done the same, and old people began to awake their appalling memories. At a point called Janardan Ghai, not far from Jenapur, upon the Brahmani, the embankment had then given way. The breach had never been properly repaired; only lately a rubble “bund” or break-water had been constructed, and now on August 20th, in the middle of the night, it gave way again. In a dark torrent, bearing sand and stones with it, the irresistible river streamed over all the lower lands around, covering the crops and melting the mud villages away like ant-heaps. The land is flat, but in the confusion and darkness the people crowded up any little slope for safety, or climbed into trees; and one woman had her baby born as she supported herself among the branches. When morning came, eight feet of turbulent water lay over their homes and crops. In November I could still trace the tidemark of the flood by tufts of dried grass and drift-wood sticking in the trees high above my head, as you may do in early summer on the banks of the Severn. [Illustration: HUNGER. [_Face p. 136._ ]