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It was some two hours ago, about seven by this time; the moonlight was more luminous, and I could see the long white streaks of it lying on the mysterious mere with its grey, greasy, half-liquid shores in which they say our fathers used to make witches walk until they sank.
Thousands of such dead remains disappeared, crumbling into fine dust and mingling with the waters, but here and there one was caught captive by the half-liquid mud, and was quickly covered and preserved from decay.
These are called the levees, and do perform their duty by keeping out the body of the waters. The shore between the banks is, I believe, never above breast-deep with the inundation; and from the circumstances of the place, and the soft, half-liquid nature of the soil, this inundation generally takes the shape of mud instead of water. Here, at the very point, has been built a town.
Each, besides his gun, carried a knife and a hatchet at his belt, a blanket strapped at his back, and a piece of dressed hide to make or mend his moccasons. It was the worst of all seasons for such a journey. The nights were cold, but the sun was warm at noon, and the half-thawed prairie was one vast tract of mud, water, and discolored, half-liquid snow.
Sometimes indeed, they are solid, and then often white, as if from complete inactivity of the liver, and sometimes half-liquid, frothy, and like yeast. One peculiarity which they always present, be their other characters what they may, is their extreme abundance, quite out of proportion to the quantity of food taken, and due to their admixture with the unhealthy secretions from the bowels.
Flounce, the terrier, snuffing disconsolately about the deck, and scratching the boards in her zeal to explore the shallow hold, at last grew weary, and came to snuggle down between the two silent companions. Not till then did the girl turn aside her face, as though studying the shore, which now melted in a soft, half-liquid band as black as coal-tar, above the luminous indigo of the river.
If they followed him there, he could swerve off to the right again as he reached the treacherous ground, and edge safely round it, while the main body of his pursuers would in all probability plunge in. "That would ensure their defeat," he said to himself, as in imagination he saw the gallant regiments floundering saddle deep in the black, half-liquid peat. As he had hoped, so it seemed to be.
One of the three flicked drops of the reddish stuff onto the inert slug, till it was well sprinkled. Then they dragged the carcass back to the termite-ruler. They got it there barely in time. In a matter of seconds after they had dropped it before the monarch, the slug had collapsed into a half-liquid puddle of decomposed protoplasm on the floor.
There, for a few vatems, which are the sols of the country, and worth about twenty reis, or half a dozen centimes each, the natives could get drinks of the crudest, and particularly assai, a liquor half-sold, half-liquid, made of the fruit of the palm-tree, and drunk from a "coui" or half-calabash in general use in this district of the Amazon.
And what is it which tells him that strange story? Yon smooth and rounded surface of rock, polished, remark, across the strata and against the grain; and furrowed here and there, as if by iron talons, with long parallel scratches. It was the crawling of a glacier which polished that rock-face; the stones fallen from Snowdon peak into the half-liquid lake of ice above, which ploughed those furrows.
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