Black rain

A woman with her jaw missing and her tongue hanging out of her mouth was wandering around the area of Shinsho-machi in the heavy, black rain. She was heading toward the north crying for help. 

Ibuse, Masuji. 1969. Black Rain. Kodansha International. 

I quickly learned what they wanted to do. Earlier investigations had concluded that the fallout from the Nagasaki bomb fell mostly in the Nishiyama Valley. Mount Kompira, which towers over Nagasaki, had shielded the upper Nishiyama Valley from the direct effect of the bomb s radiation. If there were contamination in that area, it would have come solely from the black rain, the bomb s fallout, not directly from the bomb. This provided an opportunity for a thorough study of fallout. 

This was also an opportunity for me to see something of rural Japan. Even though the affected area lay close to the city, life was completely different there. I would visit with the farmers over a cup of tea in the open-hearth kitchens of their simple dwellings, marveling at the fertility of their farmland, which was apparently untouched by the atomic bomb. Only four years after the black rain had fallen, the land was lush with eggplants, sweet potatoes, and other crops. 

Keiji Nakazawa, Kuroi ame ni utarete [Stmek by Black Rain] (Tokyo Dino Box, 2005), 8,12-13, 30. 

Alexi and his friends ran down the hill to a swampy part of the woods that contained a deep lake that they called the black hole . No one knew how deep the lake was in the middle, but it was quite shallow near to one end. Here there was an island about 20 yards out from the edge. They had waded out to the island the summer before and the water had come up to just above their knees.There had been a lot of rain in the previous couple of weeks and the water now looked a bit deeper. Robin suggested that they wade out again, and began to take her shoes and socks off. (C)... 

FIGURE 4-2 Light micrograph of a 1 pm Epon section of rabbit peripheral nerve (anterior root), stained with toluidine blue. The myelin sheath appears as a thick black ring around the pale axon. (Courtesy of Dr Cedric Raine.)... 

Accelerated exposure equipment may also be used to test for weatherfastness in plastic materials [106], The natural destructive agents inherent in weather are approximated by filtering the radiation emitted by the xenon arc lamp and by spraying the sample with water under standardized conditions [106], Test programs are designed to relate to actual outdoor exposure to rain and humidity. In a standard program, a 3 minute wet cycle typically alternates with a 17 minute dry period. Weatherfastness tests are carried out and evaluated like lightfastness tests the black panel temperature and other parameters are the same in both procedures. 

Black and White Colobus Monkey (Colobus cpjereza) / Tropical rain forest vegetation [Pj. (38)... 

Experiment.— Mercury is allowed to fall, in a fine rain, on to melted sulphur a black substance is produced this black substance is heated in a closed vessel, it is volatilised and transformed into a beautiful red solid. 

It is this horrid Smoake which obscures our Church and makes our Palaces look old, which fouls our Cloth and corrupts the Waters, so as the very Rain, and refreshing Dews which fall in the several Seasons, precipitate to impure vapour, which, with its black and tenacious quality, spots and contaminates whatever is exposed to it. ... 

Fig. 5.7 (a) Statue belonging to the group Les bourgeois de Calais (A. Rodin, cast by A. Rudier, Paris, 1920)—notice on the two arms the vertical lines that follow the rain runoff (b) Detail showing some black zones (squares in relief) that correspond to the original surface covered by the atmospheric deposit, middle in the corroded and eroded surface... 

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