But the ruin and devastation of the place were frightful to behold. The shrubbery, all along the river side, with its little hill and moss-house, had vanished; two stone and three wooden buildings were carried off; the beautiful fringe of wood on both sides of the river, with the ground it grew on, were washed to the ocean, together with all those sweet and pastoral projections of the fields which gave so peaceful and fertile a character to the valley; whilst the once green island, robbed of its groups of trees and furrowed by a dozen channels, was covered with large stones, gravel, and torn-up roots. At another part of the same river (the Divie) Sir Thomas describes, from his own observations, the progress of the flood. The noise was a distinct combination of two kinds of sound: one, an uniform continued roar; the other, like rapidly repeated discharges of cannon. The first of these proceeded from the violence of the water; the other, which was heard through it, and as it were muffled by it, came from the numerous stones which the stream was hurling over its uneven bed of rock. Above all this was heard the shrieking of the wind. The leaves were stripped off the trees and whirled into the air, and their thick boughs and stems were bending and cracking beneath the tempest. The rain was descending in sheets, not in drops: and a peculiar lurid, bronze-like hue pervaded the whole face of nature. And now the magnificent trees were overthrown faster and faster, offering no more resistance than reeds before the mower’s scythe. Numerous as they were, they were all, individually, well-known friends. Each, as it fell, gave one enormous plash on the surface, then a plunge, the root upwards above water for a moment; again all was submerged—and then up rose the stem disbranched and peeled; after which, they either toiled round in the cauldron, or darted, like arrows, down the stream. “A chill ran through our hearts as we beheld how rapidly the ruin of our favourite and long-cherished spot was going on. But we remembered that the calamity came from the hand of God; and seeing that no human power could avail, we prepared ourselves to watch every circumstance of the spectacle.” In the morning the place was seen cleared completely of shrubs, trees, and soil; and the space so lately filled with a wilderness of verdure was now one vast and powerful red-coloured river.