For the health and prosperity of every country rain and sunshine are equally necessary. No place in the world is so miserably
situated as to be deprived of sunshine all the year round. The only country
which flourishes without any rain is Egypt. But vent that strange land,
although it is rarely visited with a shower, nevertheless depends on rain for
its prosperity. Its peculiarity is that, instead of being watered to its own
showers, it derives fertility from the heavy rains falling in central Africa,
which roll down to Egypt the broad stream of the Nile.
In those land in which rain predominates, the value
of sunshine is more gratefully recognized owing to its rarity. Thus in England
a favourite agricultural proverb says
that a speck of dust in kirsch is worth a king’s on the contrary, in climes of
almost continual sunshine immense value is attend to rain. Once upon a time a
Persian king having built a beautiful palace, asked a dervish to guess what it
had cost. The holy man replied that its cost must have been a day’s rain, this
being in his eyes the most natural way to express immense value.
In Pakistan the showers of the whole year are
concentrated into a few short months, and for the greater part of the year the
unclouded sun shines on the land from morning till evening. After eight months
of almost unbroken sunshine it is no wonder that the weary people long for the
blessed rain to come and revivify’ the parched earth. If the burst of the
monsoon is delayed long after the usual date, all nature animate and inanimate,
droops and pines. The heat becomes so intense that man and beast have little
energy for a kind of work. Owing to the heat and the want of sufficient water
fever and cholera become more frequent. The best wells fail, a water flows in
the beds of the rivers, cattle and sheep begin to die of thirst, all
agricultural work is suspended, the price of grain rise rapidly, and every one
begins to discuss the melancholy prospect c a famine.
What a change comes over the jubilant face of
nature when at last the long looked for rain begins to fall! Immediately the
who] country is washed clean of all the accumulated filth in which tell germs
of cholera and other disease had been developing. The cook breezes bring back
hope and health and new energy of mind and body, not only to man, but also to
the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. Hill and dale are covered
with a mantle of reed - grass inexpressibly delightful to eyes long wearied
with the sight of the sunshine blazing on the brown withered grass. The happy peasantries
are now able to resume the labours that the delay of the rain had interrupted,
and the fears of famine that had been haunting. They are dissipated by the
copious showers.
Nor are the benefits of the rain limited to the few
months the monsoon. The abundant water pouring down from the sky on the earth
is not all allowed to flow down the swollen rivers into the barren sea. Much of
its stored up by man or nature to supply to ear’ with moisture during the
coming dry season. Great tanks are read to receive the rain as it falls, so
that it may be used to irrigate –fields and supply drinking-water for man and
beast long after the monsoon is over. The rain that sinks into the earth has
not finished its work when it has supplied nourishment to the seeds of grain
and the roots of shrubs and trees. It sinks into the earth only to rise again
in the springs of river and streams, some of which are perennial and will flow.
Thought with gradually decreasing volume, until the next monsoon. From such
bounteous Streams as these, water is diverted all though the year to irrigate
the neighbouring fields and prevent the vegetation from being destroyed by the
force of the sun. Thus the blessings of an abundant rainfall are not confined
to its immediate effect, but extend through the whole course of the years.