But Our Hopes Died Hard, And We Sneaked About The Gorgeous Lagoons, Revolvers In Hand, For A Good Hour, "Larning A Thing Or Two About The Lagoons" From Dan As We Sneaked.

The Red Lily lagoons lie away from the Roper, on either side of it, wide-spreading and shallow - great

Sheets of water with tall reeds and rushes about them, and glorious in flowering time with their immense cup-shaped crimson blossoms clustering on long stalks above great floating leaves - leaves nearly approaching three feet in diameter I think; and everywhere about the leaves hover birds and along the margins of the lagoons stalk countless waders, cranes, jabiroos, and oftentimes douce native companions.

Being so shallow and wide-spreading, the lagoons would dry up early in the "dry" were it not that the blacks are able to refill them at will from the river; for here the Roper indulges in a third "duck-under," so curious that with a few logs and sheets of bark the blacks can block the way of its waters and overflow them into the lagoons thereby ensuring a plentiful larder to hosts of wild fowl and, incidentally, to themselves.

As the mystery of this "duck-under" lies under water, it can only be described from hearsay. Here, so the blacks say, a solid wall of rock runs out into the river, incomplete, though, and complicated, rising and terminating before mid-stream into a large island, which, dividing the stream unequally, sends the main body of water swirling away along its northern borders, while the lesser current glides quietly around the southern side, slipping partly over the submerged wall, and partly through a great side-long cleft on its face - gliding so quietly that the cleft can be easily blocked and the wall heightened when the waters are needed for the lagoons.

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