On
The Top Of The Water Is A Film Of Exquisite Iridescent Colours Like
Those On A Soap Bubble, Only Darker And Brighter.
In the river
alongside the sand, there are thousands of those beautiful little
fish with a black line each side of their tails.
They are perfectly
tame, and I feed them with crumbs in my hand. After making every
effort to terrify the unknown object containing the food - gallant
bulls, quite two inches long, sidling up and snapping at my fingers-
-they come and feed right in the palm, so that I could have caught
them by the handful had I wished. There are also a lot of those
weird, semi-transparent, yellow, spotted little sandfish with cup-
shaped pectoral fins, which I see they use to enable them to make
their astoundingly long leaps. These fish are of a more nervous and
distrustful disposition, and hover round my hand but will not come
into it. Indeed I do not believe the other cheeky little fellows
would allow them to.
The men, having had their rest and their pipes, shout for me, and
off we go again. The Karkola {181} soon widens to about 100 feet;
it is evidently very deep here; the right bank (the east) is
forested, the left, low and shrubbed, one patch looking as if it
were being cleared for a plantation, but no village showing. A big
rock shows up on the right bank, which is a change from the clay and
sand, and soon the whole character of the landscape changes.
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