Under the Sun/The Rains
II.
THE RAINS.
“And the rain it raineth every day.”
Twelfth Night.
FOR many weeks there had been nothing doing, — a piping time of heat, when the sun and the moon divided the twenty-four hours between them. But all that has been changed, and on Monday came the rain. At first only wind. But I had heard the jack-tree whispering of what was coming, and among the plantains I saw that there was a secret hatching — and then on a sudden came the strong gust, rain-heralding. The wind came sweeping up, clearing the way for the rain that was close behind, and then the rain, on the earth that was gasping for it, descended in great, round, solemn drops.
And how suddenly did all nature become aware of the change! The grateful earth sent up in quick response its thanks in a scent as fragrant to us in India as is the glorious bouquet of the hay-fields at home. The joyous birds flitted here and there, hymning the bursting of the monsoon, and all the dusty trees broke out into laughing green. The swallow came down from the clouds to hawk among the shrubs, for a strange insect world was abroad, the sudden rain having startled into uncustomary daylight the night-loving moth and the feeble swarm that peoples the crepuscule. The young parrots, insolent though tailless, revelled among the neem-trees’ harsh berries, while from the softened earth, in spite of the falling rain, the mynas were busy pulling out the carelessly jocund worms. Even the wretched babblers, who had hoped to raise a second brood of young, and whose nest has in an hour become a dripping pulp, hopped, and not unmirthfully, about. The peacocks came out and danced. Even the crow was festive. But the rain that washed the aloes clean has also soaked out from their lair among them the ringed snakes, so the mungoose is holding high carnival. But hark! Already a frog? — yes, a shrivelled batrachian who, for many sun-plagued weeks had been lying by in a dusty water-pipe, feels suddenly the rush of warm rain-water, and his dusty, shrunken shell is carried out into the aqueduct. With reviving strength he stems the tide, and is soon safely on the bank. Can it be true? and he plunges into the living water again, his shrivelled body — like that curious Rose of Jericho — plumping out as it greedily absorbs the grateful liquid; and soon the lean and wretched frog, whom a week ago a hungry crow would have scorned to eat (though a stomach-denying crow is as rare as a Parsee beggar), becomes the same bloated monster in yellow and green that last year harassed us with his importunate demonstrations of pleasure. “And for als moche as” he has thus cheaply attained to respectability, he is inflated with pride. Mandeville thanked God with humility for the keeping of the good company of many lords, but the frog unasked thrusts himself and his amours upon our notice, holding with the Saracens that man is only the younger brother of swine. We welcome the rain, but could do well without the frogs.
“The croaking of frogs,” said Martin Luther at his table, “edifies nothing at all; it is mere sophistry and fruitless;” and indeed I wish we were without these vile batrachians. It is not to me at all incredible that the Abderites should have gone into voluntary exile rather than share their country unequally with frogs.
In all “the majesty of mud” they crouch on the weedy bank, croaking proudly to their dames below, who, their speckled bodies concealed, rest their chins upon the puddle- top, croaking in soft reply. Was ever lady wooed with such damp, disheartening circumstance, — the night dark, the sky filled with drifting clouds, a thin rain falling? Round the puddle’s sloppy edge — the puddle itself a two hours’ creation — has sprouted up a rank fringe of squashy green-stuff, and in this the moist lover serenades the fair. She would listen flabbily to his beguilements all night long, but suddenly round the corner comes a dog-cart. His position might be heroic, certainly it is ridiculous. Shall he die at his post, be crushed by a whirling wheel for her he loves, or shall he — get out of the way? The earth shakes below the cavalier; this is no time to hesitate; shall he move? Yes; and plop! within an inch of his charmer’s nose he has landed in the puddle. But such accidents are infrequent; the cavalier, we regret to know, generally serenades all night. By day he sleeps beneath a stone, fitting himself into a dry hole, — for frogs dare not go out in the daytime. Crows trifle with them, spit them on their black beaks, and perhaps eat them. Cats, too, will amuse themselves with frogs; even the more chivalrous dog will not disdain to bite a frog when he comes suddenly upon one round a corner. In the evening, however, he takes his hops abroad, makes his meal of ants, and starts off to the nearest place of pleasure. Shall it be the municipal tank, — the public assembly-rooms, — where the company, though numerous, is very mixed; or some private soirée musicale, where the company is select, and the risks of interruption fewer? His journey is not without its peculiar perils. What if, by mistake, he jumps down the well? the one in which live only those two old gentlemen, wretched bachelors, who, sallying forth one night — just such a night as this — to serenade a fair one, mistook their way, saw water glistening, thought they heard her voice, and plumped down twenty feet. They never got out again, and there they are to this day, old and childless; their croak is sullen and defiant, for they are down a deep well, and can’t get out. “It is enough to sour one’s temper,” acknowledges our frog; and he goes forth delicately, looking before he leaps. “Living in such a world, I seem to be a frog abiding in a dried-up well.” The Upanishad contains no happier illustration than this.
How the rain pours down! A wall, beneath which he has rested to croak awhile, cracks, gapes, and falls. By a miracle and a very long jump he escapes; but his jump has landed him in the lively rivulet which is now swirling down the middle of the road, and so, before he can draw his legs up or collect his thoughts, he is rolled along with sticks and gravel into a ditch, sucked into a water-pipe, squirted out at the other end, received by a rushing drain, and, ere he can extricate himself, is being whirled along towards the river, where live the barbarous paddy-bird and the ruthless adjutant-crane. Better, he thinks, that the wall had fallen on him. But if he does get safe to his friends, with what gusto is he hailed! At his first note the company becomes aware of a strange presence, and in silence they receive his second; and then they recognize his voice, and with redoubled volume the chorus recommences — for the night.
One of the twenty-one hells of Manu is filled with mud. I believe it to be for the accommodation of frogs.
The insect world, which during the hot weather was held in such small account, now holds itself supreme. Convinced themselves that entomology is the finest study in the world, the insects carry their doctrine at their tails’ point to convince others. Every one must learn and be quite clear about the difference between a black mosquito with grey spots, and a grey mosquito with black spots. There must be no confusion between a fly which stings you if you touch it, and a fly which if it touches you stings. No one can pretend to ignore the insect invaders — the bullety beetles and maggoty ants. Nobody can profess to do so. It is impossible to appear unconscious of long-legged terrors that silently drop on your head, or shiny, nodular ones that rush at your face and neck with a buzz in the steamy evenings in the rains. A tarantula on the towel-horse, especially if it is standing on tiptoe, is too palpable, and no one can pretend not to see it there. Spiders weighing an ounce, however harmless, are too big and too puffy to be treated with complete indifference. Then there is a pestilent animal resembling a black-beetle, with its head a good deal pulled off, having fishhooks at the ends of its legs, with which it grips you, and will not let go. Centipedes, enjoying a luxury of legs, (how strange that they are not proud!) think nothing, a mere trifle at most, of leaving all their toes sticking behind them when they run up your legs. It is an undecided point whether the toes do not grow new centipedes; at any rate the centipede grows new toes. Ridiculous round beetles tumble on their backs and scramble and slide about the dinner-table till they get a purchase on the cruet-stand, up which they climb in a deliberate and solemn manner, and having reached the top, go forthwith headlong into the mustard. Sometimes they get out again unperceived, but an irregular track of mustard on the cloth, with a drop wherever the beetle stopped to take breath, leads to the discovery of the wanderer sitting among the salad and pretending to be a caper. Then again there are oval beetles, which never tumble on their backs, but dart about so quickly that you are uncertain whether something did or did not go into the soup, until you find them at the bottom. Many other insects come to the festive board, unbidden guests; grasshoppers, with great muscular powers, but a deplorable lack of direction; minute money-spiders that drop from your eyebrows by a thread which they make fast to your nose; flimsy-winged flies that are always being singed, and forthwith proceed to spin round on their backs and hum in a high key; straw-colored crickets that sit and twiddle their long antennae at you as if they never intended moving again, and then suddenly launch themselves with a jerk into your claret; fat, comfortable-bodied moths, with thick, slippery wings, which bang phut-phut against the ceiling, until they succeed in dropping themselves down the chimney of the lamp. All these, however, are the ruck, the rabble, the tag-rag and bob-tail that follow the leader — the white ant. The white ant! What an enormous power this insect wields, and how merciless it is in the exercise of it! Here the houses may not have gardens, there the builder must use no wood. In this place people have to do without carpets, and in that without a public park. Everything must be of metal, glass, or stone that rests on the ground even for a few hours, or when you return to it, it will be merely the shell of its former self. Ruthless, omnivorous, the white ant respects nothing. And when in the rains it invades the house, what horrors supervene! The lamps are seen through a yellow haze of fluttering things; the side-board is strewn with shed wings; the night-lights sputter in a paste of corpses, and the corners of the rooms are alive with creeping, fluttering ants, less destructive, it is true, than in the “infernal wriggle of maturity,” but more noisome because more bulky and more obtrusive. The novelty of wings soon palls upon the white ants; they find they are a snare, and try to get rid of them as soon as possible. They have not forgotten the first few minutes of their winged existence, when they were drifting on the wind with birds all round them, when so many of their brothers and sisters disappeared with a snap of a beak, and when they themselves were only saved from the same fate by being blown into a bush. From this refuge they saw their comrades pouring out of the hole in the mud wall, spreading their weak, wide wings, giving themselves up to the wind, — which gave them up to the kites wheeling and recurving amongst the fluttering swarm, to the crows, noisy and coarse even at their food, to the quick-darting mynas, and the graceful, sliding king-crow; A mungoose on the bank made frequent raids upon the unwinged crowd that clustered at the mouth of the hole, keeping an eye the while on the kites, which ever and anon, with the easiest of curves, but the speed of a crossbow bolt, swooped at him as he vanished into his citadel. Overhead sat a vulture in the sulks, provoked at having been persuaded to come to catch ants [“Give me a good wholesome cat out of the river”], and wondering that the kites could take the trouble to swallow such small morsels. But the vulture is alone in his opinion if he thinks that white ants are not an important feature of the rains. The fields may blush green, and jungles grow, in a week, but unless the white ants and their allies — hard-bodied and soft-bodied — come with the new leaves, the rains would hardly be the rains.
Raining! and apparently not going to stop. The trees are all standing in their places quiet as whipped children, not a leaf daring to stir while the thunder grumbles and scolds. Now and again comes up a blast of wet wind, driving the rain into fine spray before it and shaking all the garden. The bamboos are taken by surprise, and sway in confusion here and there; but, as the wind settles down to blow steadily, their plumed boughs sway in graceful unison. The tough teak-tree hardly condescends to acknowledge the stirring influence, and flaps its thick leaves lazily; the jamun is fluttered from crown to stem; the feathery tamarinds are shivering in consternation, and, panic-stricken, the acacias toss about their tasselled leaves. There is something almost piteous in the way the plantain receives the rude wind. It throws up its long leaves in an agony, now drops them down again in despair, now flings them helplessly about. But it is not often that there is high wind with the rain. Generally there is only rain, — very much. The birds knew what was coming when they saw the drifting clouds being huddled together, and the air has been filled this hour past with their warning cries. They have now gone clamorous home. The green parrots, birds of the world as they are, went over long ago, screaming and streaming by. The crows, too, after casting about for a nearer shelter, have flung themselves across the sky towards the hospitable city. But after a long interval come by the last birds, who have dawdled over that “one worm more” too long, calling out as they pass to their comrades far ahead to wait for them; and then, after another while, comes “the very last bird,” — for when the storm is at its worst, there is always one more to pass, flying too busily to speak, and scudding heavily across the sloping rain. The young crow meant to have seen the storm out, and so he kept his seat on the roof, and in the insolence of his glossy youth rallied his old relatives escaping from the wet; but a little later, as he flapped his spongy wings ruefully homeward, he regretted that he had not listened to the voice of experience. For the rain is raining, — raining as if the water were tired of the world’s existence, — raining as if the rain hated the earth with its flowers and fruits.
And now the paths begin to show how heavy the fall is. On either side runs down a fussy stream, all pitted with rain-spot dimples, from which the larger stones jut out like pigmy Teneriffes in a mimic Atlantic; but the rain still comes down, and the two fussy streams soon join into a shallow, smoothly flowing sheet, and there is nothing from bank to bank but water-bubbles hurrying down; yet, haste as they may, they get their crowns broken by the rain-drops before they reach the corner. And now you begin to suspect rain on the sunken lawn; but before long there is no room for mere suspicion, for the level water is showing white through the green grass, in which the shrubs stand ankle-deep. How patiently the flowers wait in their ditches, bending their poor heads to the ground, and turning up their green calices to be pelted! But besides the trees and flowers and washed-out insects, there are but few creatures out in the rain. Here comes a seal carrying a porpoise on his back. No! it is our friend the bheesty. Dripping like a seaweed, a thing of all weathers, he splashes by through the dreary waste of waters like one of the pre-Adamite creatures in the Period of Sludge. Who can want water at such a time as this? you feel inclined to ask, as the shiny bheesty, bending under his shiny water-skin, squelches past, his red apron, soaked to a deep maroon, clinging to his knees. A servant remembers something left out of doors, and with his master’s wrath very present to him, detaches his mouth from the hookah bowl, and with his foolish skirts tucked round his waist, paddles out into the rain, showing behind his plaited umbrella like a toadstool on its travels. A young pariah dog goes by less dusty and less miserable than usual. The rain has taken much of the curl out of his tail, but he is, and he knows it, safer in the rain. There are no buggies passing now, from beneath whose hoods, as the vivid lightning leaps out of the black clouds, will leap sharp whip-lashes, curling themselves disagreeably round his thin loins, or tingling across his pink nose. There are no proud carriages with arrogant drivers to be rude to him if he stands still for a minute in the middle of the road to think; no older dogs on the watch to dispute, and probably to ravish from him, his infrequent treasure trove. The worms, too, like the rain, for they can creep easily over the slab ground, opening and shutting up their bodies like telescopes. The dank frogs doat on it. They hop impatiently out, albeit in a stealthy way, from clammy corners, behind pillars, and under flower-pots, to see if their ditches are filling nicely, and hop back happy.
When it rains there are, to those inside the house, two sounds, a greater and a less, and it is curious, and very characteristic of our humanity, that the less always seems the greater. The one is the great dead sound of falling water — the out-of-doors being rained upon — almost too large to hear. The other is the splashing of our eaves. Outside, the heavens are falling in detail, but the sound comes to us only in its great expanse, more large than loud, heard only as a vast mutter. At our verandah’s edge is a poor spout noisily spurting its contents upon the gravel-path, and yet it is only to our own poor spout that we give heed. If it gives a sudden spurt, we say, “How it is raining! just listen” — to the spout. The sullen roar of the earth submitting to the rain we hardly remark. We listen to the patch of plantains complaining of every drop that falls upon them, but take no note of the downward rush of water on the long-suffering, silent grass. But when it is raining be so good as to remark the ducks. They are being bred for your table, a private speculation of the cook’s, but they are never fed, so they have to feed themselves. Dinner deferred maketh ducks mad, so they sally forth in a quackering series to look for worms. Nevertheless they loiter to wash. Was ever enjoyment more thorough than that of ducks accustomed to live in a cook-house (in the corner by the stove) who have been let out on a rainy day? They can hardly waddle for joy, and stagger past, jostling each other with ill-balanced and gawky gestures. And now they have reached the water. How they bob their heads and plume their feathers, turning their beaks over their backs and quackering in subdued tones! In their element they grow courageous, for the communist crow who has left his shelter to see “what on earth those ducks can have got,” and who has settled near them, is promptly charged, beak lowered, by the drake, who waggles his curly tail in pride as the evil fowl goes flapping away.
But let the ducks quacker their short lives out in the garden puddles — the carrion crow is off to the river, for the great river is in flood, and many a choice morsel, it knows, is floating down to the sea. Videlicet the succulent kid; guinea-fowls surprised on their nests by the sudden water; young birds that had sat chirping for help on bush and stone as the flood rose up and up, the parent birds fluttering round, powerless to help and wild with protracted sorrow; snakes which hiding in their holes had hoped to tire out the water, but which, when the banks gave way, were swept struggling out into the current; the wild cat’s litter, which the poor mother with painful toil had carried into the deepest cranny of the rock, drowned in a cluster, and floating down the river to the muggurs.[1]
The muggur is a gross pleb, and his features stamp him low-born. His manners are coarse. The wading heifer has hardly time to utter one terror-stricken groan ere she is below the crimson-bubbled water. Woe to the herdsman if he leads his kine across the ford. The water-fowl floating on the river, the patient ibis, the grave sarus-cranes, fare ill if they tempt the squalid brute. The ghurial[2] is of a finer breed. Living in the water he seeks his food in it, and does not flaunt his Maker with improvidence by wandering on the dry earth in search of sustenance. But at times the coarse admixture of his blood shows out, and he imitates his vulgar cousin in tying by the water’s edge, where the grazing kine may loiter, the weary peasant be trudging unobservant towards his home, his little son gathering drift-wood along the flood-line as he goes.
And the flood is out over the gardens and fields. Out on the broad lagoon, the gray-white kingfisher, with its shrill cry, is shooting to and fro where yesterday the feeble-winged thrush-babblers were wrangling over worms: the crocodile rests his chin on the grass-knoll where a few hours ago two rats were sporting. See the kingfisher, — how he darts from his watch-tower, checks suddenly his forward flight, starts upwards for a moment, hovering over the water with craning neck. And now his quick-beating wings close, and straight as a falling aerolite he drops, his keen, strong beak cleaving the way before him. And with what an exultant sweep he comes up, with the fish across his bill! The kingfisher is too proud to blunder: if he touches the water he strikes his prey; but rather than risk failure, he swerves when in his downward course to swerve had seemed impossible, and skimming the ruffled surface goes back to his watch-tower. He would not have his mate on the dead branch yonder see him miss his aim; rather than hazard discomfiture he simulates contempt, turning back with a cheery cry to her side, while the lucky fishlet darts deep among the weeds.
The great river is in flood. “Oh, Indra the Rain-giver, by all thy Vedic glories, we invoke thee, be merciful!” Miles down they will know it by the sudden rush, — the bridges of boats that will part asunder, and the clumsy, high-prowed native craft that will sink; but here, where the mischief has its source, where the heavy rain is falling and the deluge brewing, there is nothing to mark the change. But the river swells up secretly, as it were, from underneath. The flood is to be a surprise; and lo! suddenly, the water is spread out on either side, over crops and grass fields. Where are the islands gone on which the wiseacre adjutant-birds were yesterday promenading? Are those babool-trees or fishermen’s platforms out yonder in the middle of the river? Surely there used to be a large field hereabouts with a buffalo’s whitened skull lying in the corner, and a young mango-tree growing about the middle of it? Can that be the mango-tree yonder where the current takes a sudden swerve? Alas for the squirrels that had their nest in it! Alas for the vagrant guinea-fowl which far from home had hidden her speckled eggs in the tall tussock of sharp-edged grass which grew by the buffalo skull!
Those two villages yonder were yesterday separated only by a green valley streaked by a hundred footpaths; they now look at each other across a lake. The kine used to know their way home, but are puzzled. Here, they feel certain, is the tree at which yesterday they turned to the right, and this is the path which led them down a hill and up another, but it ends to-day in water! How cautiously they tread their way, sinking lower, lower — so gradually that we can hardly tell that they have begun to swim; but there is now a rod and more between the last cow and the shore where the herdsman stands watching. He sees them climb out on the other side, one behind the other, sees their broad backs sloped against the hill before him. Then they reach the top and lowing break into a trot, disappearing gladly behind the mud walls which contain their food; and the herdsman turns and trudges the circuit of the invading water.
One year the Ganges and the Jumna conspired together to flood the province, and suddenly swelling over their banks, desolated in a night half the busy city of Allahabad. We brought our boat up to the new lagoons, and for a whole day sailed about among nameless islands, great groves of bird-deserted trees, and the ruins of many villages, amid scenes as strange and as beautiful as we shall ever see again. The Maruts, armed with their hundred-jointed bolts, and the stormgod Peru, of the thunder-black hair and beard of lightning-gold, who goes rumbling over the midnight clouds astride a millstone — and all the little hearth-spirits quake at his going and fear falls upon the house — had been abroad for many days. And the river-gods were up at their bidding, and the clouds poured into the rivers, and the rivers drove down to the sea. And before the pitiless rush of the flood, what difference between man and beast? All of them rats alike, poor creeping folk, flooded out of their holes. The same wind and rain tore the crow’s nest from the tree and the roof from the native’s hut; the same flood carried the two away together. The tiger, the man, and the woodlouse were all on one platform, and that which crept highest was the best among them.
Starting in our boat from the spot where once four cross-roads had met, we crossed over towards the belt of trees that hides the city from sight as you look westward. Deep down beneath us, patient crops of millet were standing in their places, waiting for the water to pass away; acres of broad-leafed melons looked up at our boat as we wound in and out among the trees and little temples. With some thirty feet of water below us we floated over the brickfields and came to a village, and, skirting the ruins of the suburbs, passed out again through a tope of mango-trees into the open. A garden lay before us. The pillars of the gateway had strange animals upon the tops of them, rampant against shields; but in the flood they looked as if they were standing tiptoe upon their hind legs in the hope of keeping out of the water which lapped over their clawed feet. Over the wall and into the garden. Such a place for Naiads! The tops of plantain-trees instead of lotus-pads, for bulrushes bamboo spikes, and instead of water-tangle the fair green crowns of bushes, lit up with blossoms. Rustling through the guava-tops, half-ripened citrons knocking against our boat’s keel, we pass out over the other wall of the garden, and found ourselves in a superb canal, avenued on either side with tamarinds, their lowest branches dipping in the flood, and closed in at the further end with a handsome pleasure-house that stood — the only building, except the stone-built temples, that had braved the rush of the escaping river — knee-deep in the water. The scene had all the charms of land and water, without the blemishes of either; for the water had no vulgar banks, no slimy slopes nor leprous sand-patches; while the houses had no lower stories, and the round crowns of foliage no unsightly trunks. And there was not a human being in sight! River terns swept in and out among the garden trees, furrowing the new water-fields with their orange bills, and resting, when tired, upon the painted balconies of the pleasure-house.
And we rowed past the dwarfed walls with the dreary, pleasant sound of the flood lapping against them, and passed down the stately reach of water till we came to the beautiful temple of Mahadeva, that lifts up its crown of maroon and gold high out of the solemn hush of the trees among which its foundations lie. A golden god glittered at the point — a star to the people. The gate was closed, but as we lay on our oars before it, there came, on the sudden from within, the clanging of the temple bell, that through all the year rings in every hour of night or day! Who was pulling the bell? A merman? Perhaps, forsaken by all his priests, the god himself! We shouted. A tern was startled by the shout, and an owl fell out of a hole in the wall; but there was no reply. Another shout, however, was answered — was it a human voice? — and then we heard the unseen bell-ringer swimming to the gate. It opened after much trouble and splashing, and we floated into the enclosure, came into the Lake of Silence, our guide swimming alongside. What a strangely sacred place it seemed, this temple to Mahadeva! Up to its terrace in water, the marble bulls conchant in the flood, on which floated here and there the last votive marigolds thrown before the god, the shrine was the very emblem of Faith, as it reared its glittering crown skyward up above the creeping, treacherous water, — in the hands of the Philistines perhaps, but the Samson nevertheless, — its feet in the toils, but head erect to heaven. We all talked in a more or less maudlin way, for sentiment made a fool of each in turn. But no one of us who saw it can forget that strange Indian scene. The gracious water sparkled from wall to wall of the small enclosure, concealing all the dirt of the common earth, and all that was impure or unsightly round the foot of the temple. The flowering bushes rested their blossoms on the water, and the shrubs showed only their green crowns. The squalor and clamor of an Indian temple were all gone, and in their stead was the cleansing, mock-reverent water and the silence of Dreamland. The glamour of the place was strange beyond words. For sound there was only the plash of the water-bird’s wing, and the rhythmic lapping of the flood against the balconades. For the view, it was hemmed in by the tree-tops that overlooked the enclosure on all four sides. But within the small area was all that enchantment needed. It was Fairyland, with only a bright summer’s sun shining upon every thing to remind us of the e very-day earth. But suddenly the bell rang again. Fairyland or not, the hours were passing. So we floated out of the doorway again into the exquisite water-road, and sailed away. Look where we would, water, water, water, margined and broken by groves of trees, with here and there a suspicion of ruined houses from which now and again came wailing along the water the cry of some deserted dog. But nothing of every-day life! Where were the villages, with their cracked mud walls? the loitering natives, the roads and their dusty traffic? the creeping, creaking bullock-carts, and the jingling ekkas, baboo-laden? There were no parrot-ravaged crops, no muddy buff’aloes, no limping, sneaking pariah dogs to remind us of India. Even the kites, sailing in great circles above the broad sunlit water, did not seem the same birds that a few days before wheeled in hopes of offal round the village. The vulture on the palm-top was a very Jatayus among vultures. Where were we then but in Dreamland? A solitary palm — do you remember how Xerxes went out of his way with his army to do homage to the great plane-tree that queened it in the desert alone? — attracted us, and we sailed for it. All great trees grow alone. This one was standing between two round little islands bright with young grass, so close and clean that they looked like green velvet footstools for some giant’s use. Their shores were fringed with drift-wood and strange jetsam, among which bobbed up and down some great round palm-fruit; and on the top of each island sat a solitary crow. They had come, no doubt, from Kurghalik, the capital (so Thibetan legends say) of crowdom. At any rate, they were Dreamland crows. They were less criminal in appearance than earth crows; they did not insult us by word or gesture, for they did not caw once; nor, when we approached, did they sidle or hop sideways. Some of my readers may not easily believe in such a revolution of crow nature, but those take high ground who maintain that no change of character, however violent, is impossible. Did not Alcibiades the volupt become a Spartan for the nonce! Remember Saul of Tarsus.
As we landed, one crow raised itself with all the dignity of a better bird, and with three solemn flaps passed over to the central top of the farther island; and when we went there to take possession of it also “in the Queen’s name,“ both of them flapped with three strokes back to the first. And we christened one island Engedi, for we remembered Holy Writ, ”exalted as the palm-tree in Engedi;“ and the other we called the Loochoo Island, for Loochoo means in Japanese, ”the Islet in a Waste of Waters“ — a great deal for a word to mean, but true nevertheless. Humpty-Dumpty would have called it a “portmanteau word.” And we gave the crows commissions as Lieutenant-Governors from Her Majesty Queen Victoria, quamdiu se bene gesserint. And then we went on to another island, a long one with a tree in the middle. And under the tree stood a white calf, so we knew at once that this was a water-calf. For there was no land it could have come from within sight, and no human being but ourselves within a mile of it on either side. And at night when thieves bring their boats to steal what they consider quite an ordinary calf, deserted, they think, by its owner when the swift flood overtook him, the calf no doubt dives under the water, and thus evades them.
The rest of the islands were deserted. The ruins of houses and temples, waist-deep in water, showed that within recent times there had been inhabitants of this strange and beautiful archipelago. Icthyophagi no doubt. There was nothing else for them to eat. But just now the birds were alone. All round us the kingfishers (long may ye live before ye become poor men’s barometers!) poised in the air, and, wild as the cry of the wild ass in the Bikanir deserts, came to us the scream of the fishing-hawk. But no — the birds were not alone. The flood had driven from the earth its multitude of creeping folk: snakes hung across the forks of trees, or basked on the branches; centipedes crawled upon floating rubbish; and many bushes were black to every tip with thronging ants. In one tree-hollow we surprised strange company — a pair of gorgeous dhaman snakes, three bran-new centipedes bright as copper, a most villainous-looking spider, and a gem of a frog, a little metallic creature that showed among the foul crew like the maiden among Comus’s companions. We disturbed them rudely, and then went in pursuit of a bandicoot that was swimming to an unwonted roost — poor wretch! — in a citron tree. A little bird was sitting on a bush, scratching its head, its day’s work over, and thinking of nothing in particular; but a hawk that had had no dinner came by, and gave it something to think about. A pariah dog had a litter upon a patch of tiles, all that remained of a house-roof, and we rescued the starveling brute. A rat floated by in a sieve: another was cruising more dryly in a gourd. Look at that squirrel! The imposture is out. So long as he had the firm earth to fall back upon, he lived bravely enough in the trees; but now that he has only the trees, he is starving. The “tree squirrel” forsooth! But was there no Isis or Osiris, no Apis of the “awful front,” nor dog-headed Anubis to tell it that the floods were coming? In Egypt some one tells the crocodiles every year how high the Nile will rise; for let the sourceless river rise never so much, the great suarian’s eggs are always found above the reach of the highest wave. But the squirrel without the ground is better off than a grasshopper without grass to hop in: it is then a poor thing indeed. One hopped into our boat — a desperate leap for life — such as egg-seekers take at the dangling rope on St. Kilda’s face. I remember reading in Bacon that “the vigor of the grasshopper consists only in their voices.” That they can make a noise out of all proportion to their size is true, but it seems to me that Bacon cast undeservedly a slur upon the “gaers toop.” The particular grasshopper in point may have been a cripple, but, as a rule, the insect has a shrewd way of hopping that makes me think respectfully of his hind legs, and looking into the matter, I find I am borne out by Sir Thomas Browne, who says, “whereto [that is leaping] it is very well conformed, for therein the [grasshopper] the legs behind are longer than all the body, and make at the second joint acute angles at a considerable advancement above their bodies.” Do not the French call the grasshopper sauterelle? A poor beetle with the shoulders of Atlas and the thighs of Hercules, which in dryer weather drove headlong through the solid earth, heaving great pebbles up as Enceladus heaves Etna, was sprawling helpless as a moth upon the water. We rescued Goliath and went on. A frog, great with rain-water and inordinately puffed up, sat pudgily on a stump. It narrowly escaped with life, for the sight of it enwrathed us. Had the floods then (a nation’s history closing in a sudden stroke of picturesque fate) tragically closed an era, that a spotted frog might go comfortably? The Empire of Assyria expiring with the flames of Sardanapalus’s pyre — Babylon poured out under the feet of the Mede with the wine along Belshazzar’s palace floor — the Icthyophagi succumbing to the united wrath of a continent’s mightiest rivers, and gone to feed the fish they fed on! All this that a gape-mouthed batrachian might give itself complacent airs! The earth submerged, the Caucasian a failure, and a frog happy! A deluge, whirling men and their houses away to the sea, to be a holiday and a Golden Age for a gross amphibian! The idea incensed us, and the frog was in a parlous state. But it escaped.
Meanwhile the sun is setting, and we turn homewards — home in the dusk. The terns are all gone, but in their place the flying-foxes flap heavily along the water, and the owls hail us from all the shadows. How appropriate to the owl are the words of the poet (to the nightingale) —
“Sweet bird, that shunn’st the noise of folly.
Most musical, most melancholy.”
The very name too, ooloo, is a sweet symphony. The frogs jeered as we passed. One of us recalled the lines —
“You shall have most delightful melodies as soon as you lay to your oars.
“From whom?
“From swans — the frogs — wondrous ones.”
And so through a chorus of exulting batrachians, home again to the solid earth, the noise of men, and the multitudinous chirping of birds.