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Chapters (20)
  1. Cover
  2. Biographical Notes
  3. Title Page
  4. INTRODUCTION TO THE 2021 EDITION
  5. AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
  6. STORM
  7. Epigraph
  8. Dedication
  9. FIRST DAY
  10. SECOND DAY
  11. THIRD DAY
  12. FOURTH DAY
  13. FIFTH DAY
  14. SIXTH DAY
  15. SEVENTH DAY
  16. EIGHTH DAY
  17. NINTH DAY
  18. TENTH DAY
  19. ELEVENTH DAY
  20. TWELFTH DAY

Over all the Valley rain was falling—on plowed land and stubble, on pasture and fallow and orchard. It fell on the black soil and the red soil, on the loam, the clay, the adobe, on the silt of the bottom-lands and the peat-earth of the delta.

It poured upon the mile-wide fields of new wheat and barley. It turned the alfalfa a brighter green. It glistened upon the gray leaves of the olive-trees, and made darker the dark green of the orange-trees. It wet the up-turned, delicate branches of the leafless peaches and plums and almonds, and the stiff rods of the cherries and the pears; it wet the myriad stubby branches of the figs—rigid, like gnarled fingers. It wet alike the wide-spreading walnut trees and the close-pruned grape-vines.

Against all the cities of the plain the storm was beating—Oroville of the olives; Marysville of the peaches; and Colusa of the rice and barley; river-girt, high-domed Sacramento; Stockton, where the ocean-steamers dock far within the wide-reaching plain; Lodi of the grapes; Corcoran of the wheat; Fresno of the figs and raisins; Porterville of the oranges; Tulare of the cotton. Over them all was rain.

(That the shoots of wheat and barley might stand upright, and the rice and cotton sprout in their season. That in long rows the asparagus might thrust its stalks though the peat of the delta. That the almond-blossoms might soon be like a shining white cloud on the slopes, and in the summer sun the trays of drying prunes and apricots be bright rectangles of purple and orange.)

Five hundred miles from Red Bluff to the Grapevine, all the rich, flat land—over it all was rain.

TENTH DAY

1

While men built Westminster Abbey and King Louis the Saint rode to his crusades, the cliff-cities of Mesa Verde—first civilization within the area of the United States—knew their last prosperity. For seven centuries they have lain empty, shunned by Ute and Navajo as spirit-haunted ruins of the Old People. But those centuries have meant little to earth and sun; as today, the winter storms swept down when Balcony House was new and fat babies rolled on its terrace.