96	HIROSHIMA
injuries seemed to make good progress, and he even
began to treat refugees who came to him from the
neighbourhood, using medical supplies he had retrieved
from a cache in the suburbs. He noticed in some of
Ms patients a curious syndrome of symptoms thai
cropped out in the third and fourth weeks, but he was
not able to do much more than swathe cuts and burns.
Early in September, it began to rain, steadily, and
heavily. The river rose. On September 17th, there
came a cloudburst and then a typhoon, and the water
crept higher and higher up the bank. Mr. Okuma and
Dr. Fujii became alarmed and scrambled up the
mountain to a peasant's house. (Down in Hiroshima,
the flood took up where the bomb had left off—
swept away bridges that had survived the blast, washed
out streets, undermined foundations of buildings that
still stood—and ten miles to the west, the Ono Army
Hospital, where a team of experts from Kyoto Imperial
University was studying the delayed affliction of the
patients, suddenly slid down a beautiful, pine-dark
mountainside into the Inland Sea and drowned most
of the investigators and their mysteriously diseased
patients alike.) After the storm, Dr. Fujii and Mr.
Okuma went down to the river and found that the
Okuma house had been washed altogether away.
Because so many people were suddenly feeling sick
' nearly a month after the atomjc bomb was dropped,
an unpleasant rumour began to move around, and
eventually it made its way to the house in Kabe where
Mrs. Nakamura lay bald and ill. It was that the atomic
bomb had deposited some sort of poison on Hiroshima
which would give off deadly emanations for seven