Gray Shirt Attempts To Get A Shot At It,
But It - Alarmed At Our Unusual Appearance - Raises Itself Up With
One
of those graceful preliminary curtseys, and after one or two
preliminary flaps spreads its broad wings and sweeps away,
With its
long legs trailing behind it like a thing on a Japanese screen.
The river into which we ran zigzags about, and then takes a course
S.S.E. It is studded with islands slightly higher than those we
have passed, and thinly clad with forest. The place seems alive
with birds; flocks of pelican and crane rise up before us out of the
grass, and every now and then a crocodile slides off the bank into
the water. Wonderfully like old logs they look, particularly when
you see one letting himself roll and float down on the current. In
spite of these interests I began to wonder where in this lonely land
we were to sleep to-night. In front of us were miles of distant
mountains, but in no direction the slightest sign of human
habitation. Soon we passed out of our channel into a lovely,
strangely melancholy, lonely-looking lake - Lake Ncovi, my friends
tell me. It is exceedingly beautiful. The rich golden sunlight of
the late afternoon soon followed by the short-lived, glorious
flushes of colour of the sunset and the after-glow, play over the
scene as we paddle across the lake to the N.N.E. - our canoe leaving
a long trail of frosted silver behind her as she glides over the
mirror-like water, and each stroke of the paddle sending down air
with it to come up again in luminous silver bubbles - not as before
in swirls of sand and mud. The lake shore is, in all directions,
wreathed with nobly forested hills, indigo and purple in the dying
daylight. On the N.N.E. and N.E. these come directly down into the
lake; on N.W., N., S.W., and S.E. there is a band of well-forested
ground, behind which they rise. In the north and north-eastern part
of the lake several exceedingly beautiful wooded islands show, with
gray rocky beaches and dwarf cliffs.
Sign of human habitation at first there was none; and in spite of
its beauty, there was something which I was almost going to say was
repulsive. The men evidently felt the same as I did. Had any one
told me that the air that lay on the lake was poison, or that in
among its forests lay some path to regions of utter death, I should
have said - "It looks like that"; but no one said anything, and we
only looked round uneasily, until the comfortable-souled Singlet
made the unfortunate observation that he "smelt blood." {185} We
all called him an utter fool to relieve our minds, and made our way
towards the second island. When we got near enough to it to see
details, a large village showed among the trees on its summit, and a
steep dwarf cliff, overgrown with trees and creeping plants came
down to a small beach covered with large water-washed gray stones.
There was evidently some kind of a row going on in that village,
that took a lot of shouting too.
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