In one place a large ancestral temple was levelled to the ground. "Didn't you fee] afraid when you heard that temple fall at your door?' I asked a neighbour, who lived but a hundred yards from the demolished building. "We couldn't hear a sound of anything falling the wind howled so," was the reply. Not only houses, trees and land have been uprooted but in many districts roads, miles in extent, have been torn away and the track has been obliterated. To reach some villages one has had to clamber over a long stretch of switchback succession of cliffs which fringed the mountain stream. Arriving at a point where two streams converged, a landslide of considerable dimensions had laid waste several hundred acres of rice fields which, at the time, were ready to be garnered. A hill had moved and, like an avalanche, came sweeping down astride the two streams. The pent-up waters became a lake and flooded the villages in the vicinity. This barrier of earth and rock held back the waters for four or five hours. The people in the villages along the line through which the stream passed could not understand why it was that, with such a deluge, instead of surging along in flood, the waber-course gradually became shorn of its fury and considerably diminished in its flow. Suddenly there was a roar, for the imprisoned waters had worked a channel through the landslide and tore down the ravine in relentless fury, carrying everything away—troops, roads, bridges utterly regardless even of human life itself.
A sad catastrophe occurred in another valley where there are several villages situated at the foot of a long line of hills called the "Bamboo range." In the middle of the night a wooded hill began to, slide. The large cyprus trees came sweeping down completely overwhelming some of the homes which were cut down like grass before the scythe and buried in the debris. At daylight the villagers were panic-stricken to find that several houses had been wiped out of existence. The work of rescue was carried on and about noon the next day they recovered 19 bodies which had been buried alive. Two little baby boys—jolly little fellows they were~and a young girl—four years of age, were found clasped in their mother's arms and, though in a semi-conscious condition, their lives had been preserved.
The village of Linche nestles in the cup of an uninterrupted mass of treeless hills. It is a place where three counties meet and three streams converge which, after any
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.