Then, like Father Nile himself, the River swelled and rose. Gently, in a thousand places, it overflowed into the tule-swamps. Mile by mile the shallow waters crept across the grassland; water lapped at the oak-roots. From high above, the flying wild duck saw a paradise of wide-stretching, quiet, inland lake, with here and there a grassy island. In long looping parallel lines, the bare willow-tops showing above water forlornly marked the summer channel.

At last, more deadly than flood-waters, the gold-seeking white men came to the lands along the River. After a few seasons, the tall elk, the bears, and the dark-skinned people vanished, and were as if they had never been. Even of the River itself, the white men were contemptuous. First of all, they cast into it the debris of gold-mining, so that even the summer channel clogged. After some years, came men called farmers. In disdain and ignorance they plowed the rich valley lands, and then cursed when the river rose and destroyed the new crops.

But these white men were not like the dark-skinned people who in the old days bowed before the River’s will. They were not even like the pliant Egyptians who made use of the Nile’s flood for their own ends. Instead, these white men made no truce with nature. For, in those days, it might happen that a man rode horseback around the boundaries of his land, and noticed that nowhere was the water more than a foot or two deep. Then he thought craftily that if he scraped up a little berm of dirt three feet high around his land, he might raise crops and market them at high prices when his neighbors’ lands were flooded. So he did, and grew rich. But his neighbors also wished to grow rich; so singly or banding together in companies, they too built dikes.

Then something unforeseen happened. The waters of the River, shut out from much land, rose higher upon the lands that were left, and so broke over many dikes and again flooded the farms. The white men cursed, thinking that the rains must have been heavier than before; they decided to build levees a little higher, and be safe forever. In those years that followed, a confusion as of a nightmare fell upon the Valley. More and more levees were built, and each one made the water rise so that men had to build up the old ones higher still. The white men would not withdraw from the lands, and neither in their peculiar madness would they all work together against the River. Instead, in the dark rainy nights a man might break his neighbor’s levee to lower the water-level against his own; so, not with shovels, but with loaded guns, men patrolled the levees, like savages brandishing spears against the river-god.