Hello! I'm a little water droplet. I'm still small, but very soon I'll be big! You'll see!
I was born just recently, in April. In the Urals, although... No, in the Caucasus. Or no... I don't know. Anyway, high in the mountains. It was morning. The sun warmed my back and sides, and it felt so good to be free after being trapped in an icy block! I had waited for this for so long, like an eternity!
And then I rolled into a small narrow stream.
Hello, hello! — my little sister droplets immediately spoke up.
They looked so much like me! Or I looked like them. What? Oh, we're all the same, why did I think otherwise? Anyway, we talked about the lives of my sisters. They also came out of the ice at that very moment when the Sun, cheerfully sparkling with bright, lively rays, melted us one by one. We were picked up by its friends — the North, South, East, and West winds. A current is even named after the last one! That's how powerful they are!
But everything, contrary to expectations, went in a very strange way. Of course, I could have been blown by the wind onto rocks and dried up like a desert, but I was lucky. The North and East winds quarreled and kept making me hang over a cliff, then tossed me high into the air. Finally they threw me into a stream and howled in the heights like wolves. Don't ask me how I know who they are. I saw them. I hadn't frozen with my sisters yet at that time, and I lived in a mountain lake. And then they came.
They were huge gray animals with enormous fangs. They began to drink, greedily swallowing every drop of water. And then others came. They were even bigger, reaching to the sky itself, or maybe even higher, and covered in brown fur. Smooth white rounded branches stuck out of their mouths, and their noses were very, very long! With them they made strange sounds and drove away the wolves.
But now I'm floating along the stream, which I can rightfully call my first home. And then there were many streams, and now it's not a stream anymore, but a small river. Still not a river, but bigger than a stream, and that's something. Further on, the river gradually widened, and now it's a river, a mountain river, and therefore full and fast-flowing. Everything around blurred into one big colorful spot. Everyone held their breath. We were floating straight toward a waterfall!
And then we all hung suspended in the air. White pure light flickered and sparkled on our sides. And suddenly red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, dark blue, and violet rays flashed in the air like tongues of colored flame.
This is called a rainbow. It has amazed and continues to amaze people with its beauty. It's no wonder that the ancient Greeks had a goddess of the rainbow — Iris, and in the Old Testament a rainbow appeared before Noah at the end of the Great Flood! People even say:
