On Our River There Is Here
Another Broad Low Island With Its Gold-Coloured Banks Shining Out,
Seemingly Barring The Entire Channel, But There Is Really A Canoe
Channel Along By Both Banks.
We turn at this point into a river on the north bank that runs north
and south - the current is running very swift to the north.
We run
down into it, and then, it being more than time enough for chop, we
push the canoe on to a sandbank in our new river, which I am told is
the Karkola. I, after having had my tea, wander off, and find
behind our high sandbank, which like all the other sandbanks above
water now, is getting grown over with hippo grass - a fine light
green grass, the beloved food of both hippo and manatee - a forest,
and entering this I notice a succession of strange mounds or heaps,
made up of branches, twigs, and leaves, and dead flowers. Many of
these heaps are recent, while others have fallen into decay.
Investigation shows they are burial places. Among the debris of an
old one there are human bones, and out from one of the new ones
comes a stench and a hurrying, exceedingly busy line of ants,
demonstrating what is going on. I own I thought these mounds were
some kind of bird's or animal's nest. They look entirely unhuman in
this desolate reach of forest. Leaving these, I go down to the
water edge of the sand, and find in it a quantity of pools of
varying breadth and expanse, but each surrounded by a rim of dark
red-brown deposit, which you can lift off the sand in a skin.
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