The English traveler Hugo Chateris many years ago observed a magical ceremony of calling the rain in Guinea, which he later described in his travel notes. “The tomtoms, without stopping, beat all night. In front of the hut of the local Ju-Ju, a professional miracle worker from the clan of initiates, the entire population of the village had already gathered. Opposite him stood a naked young woman whose face was covered with a thick veil. It was a "rain charmer" from a neighboring tribe, whom Ju-Ju invited to assist him at such a responsible ceremony. For a moment she swayed silently to the beat of the drum. Then she began to conduct the tom-tams herself, throwing up her arms at an ever-faster pace. I looked at the sky and could not believe my eyes: the whitish haze, barely noticeable in the evening, turned into a gray veil, which thickened and became heavier with every minute. In places, dark storm clouds were beginning to swirl in it …"
A resident of India and an Uzbek farmer, a Russian peasant and fellah in Iraq are waiting for a blessed rain.
The Middle Eastern chronicles also speak of the great drought that happened in ancient times. For example, “in December 940 a drought began in Iraq, followed by hunger and thirst. The famine was so terrible that people began to eat the corpses of the dead, which there was no one to bury, since their number was very huge. From hunger, the people began to swell and stomach ache. At the same time, the plague began. The disease did not subside from the bloodletting, but, on the contrary, became more complicated. A lot of people died from it."
More than once the drought brought irreparable harm to the people of the southern regions of our country. The Nikon Chronicle under the year 1162 says: "The same summer, the bucket and the heat of the great summer were fast and every grain and every abundance were burnt, and the lakes and rivers dried up, the swamps burned out, and the forests and lands burned." The heat was long, exhausting, very painful for people and for all living things in general. Sometimes the fires were so smoky that the sun shone through the darkness for weeks on end. Almost all the bread died, and "a terrible famine set in." Rivers dried up, springs dried up, fish died in reservoirs. The heat was in the Russian land and in Western Europe.
The worst drought was in 1180 in Western Japan. In three summer months, there were only eighteen days with little rain, and little rice was harvested.
In Western Japan, including the city of Kyoto, confusion reigned over a terrible famine. The author of the famous book "Kojiki", who then visited the city of Kyoto, wrote that he counted over 42300 corpses of people on its streets. In eastern Japan, where the harvest was excellent, supporters of the Mamamoto family took advantage of this terrible tragedy, revolted and overthrew the Taira ruler, who ruled the country. Although the number of Mamamoto's troops was small, the war ended in their favor almost instantly. So warriors from East Japan, where there was a bountiful harvest, defeated the strongest army of Western Japan, suffering from drought and hunger.
The situation in Brazil was extremely threatening at the beginning of 1959. Thousands of crowds of starving peasants flooded the streets of the cities. The merchants closed the doors of their shops and stores. The markets were emptied. The townspeople locked themselves in their homes. Hungry, homeless peasants were dying in the streets. In the city of Fortaleza, four hundred children died of hunger in just one week.
The drought of 1959 became a terrible scourge for all northeastern vakeiro - Brazilian herders and farmers. She tore them off the ground, abundantly watered with their own sweat and blood, and drove them along the roads of the country away from their homes.
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In the sertans, the steppes in northeastern Brazil, this natural disaster occurs frequently, and in some areas for several years in a row. The drought of 1958 was especially disastrous in its consequences. In the state of Ceará, it affected 2.5 million people, and the damage to agriculture was estimated at ten billion cruzeiro.
The most pressing problem in northeastern Brazil is water, which is essential for both life and irrigation. Lack of water often pushes poverty to the extreme. Dry seasons sometimes last from seven to twenty months, when during all this time there is no rainfall. In parts of the interior of Brazil, it had not rained for about seven years until 1958.
Severe droughts and the absence of permanent rivers leave a special imprint on the entire landscape of northeastern Brazil. Huge territories (about 500 thousand square kilometers) are covered by kaatinga - the so-called white forests. They are islets of desert thorny vegetation that still retain water and nutrients in their stems and roots. Caatinga soils are generally lean and hard. During the dry months, much of northeastern Brazil turns into a scorched desert, where torch cactus with needles charred by the heat, chikeshike cacti, joiseiro and canafistula trees that can withstand the scorching heat, stick out here and there.
When rivers and forests completely dried up turned into brown cemeteries, when stones, like hot coals, burned the feet, when fires raged caused by the combustion of dry grass and brushwood, a person found salvation in the Brezho.
Brejo is a low-lying area that retains water in summer, thanks to the black clay subsoil, which retains large reserves of water. In such Brezho, Brazilian tillers dug wells. Peasants came to these precious sources of life for water from places remote for many, many kilometers.
But the drought of 1958 destroyed these rare oases as well. Hunger raged in the state of Ceara.
Terrible pictures could be observed in 1973 (and then again in 1978) in the Sahel zone - regions lying south of the Sahara. Rickety children with stomachs swollen from hunger, and flies, flies, flies all around … Tenacious and constantly buzzing, they are next to death, at the same time with death, they suck out the remnants of human strength and blood.
Droughts sneak up almost imperceptibly, without dire signs, in secret. As if nothing supernatural happens - there is simply no rain. Before the "dry death" arrived in the Sahel, there was almost no rain for five years. And in 1973 there were none at all.
The drought brought famine with it. People had nothing else left: no milk, no fat, no meat, no flour. The crops were burnt on the vine, cows, goats and sheep could not find food on the scorched pastures and died in thousands every day. In the Ethiopian province of Vollo, two hundred starving people died every day, the exact number of victims is unknown … In addition, an intensive offensive of the desert sands on the already developed, cultivated lands was noted.
Drought always threatens those who live on the edge of the desert, where agriculture is impossible without rain. There were no terrible disasters in South Africa for three hundred years before 1983. But this year (as well as in the central regions), at first, thousands of heads of cattle died, and then the harvest in the fields was burned. States such as Zambia and Zimbabwe could completely turn into a desert.
HUNDRED GREAT DISASTERS. N. A. Ionina, M. N. Kubeev