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Despite the times and the manners, Bud's girth increased insidiously. His hard-riding days were past. Progress marched steadily onward, leaving an after-guard of homesteaders intrenched behind miles of barbed-wire fence and mazes of irrigating-ditches.
It is in some such resting-place as this that I have often been privileged to light upon the Lampyris banqueting on the prey which he had just paralyzed on its shaky support by his surgical artifices. But he is familiar with other preserves. He frequents the edges of the irrigating-ditches, with their cool soil, their varied vegetation, a favourite haunt of the mollusc.
The land is too valuable to be devoted to pasture, and the forests nearly everywhere have been sacrificed to tillage to such an extent that the material for the enormously thick native coffins has now to be imported from abroad. Streams and irrigating-ditches were so frequent that we were continually saturated with water or covered with mud.
That its ultimate end is irrigation, and not transportation, is everywhere evident. To keep religion a muddy, polluted, pestilential river, instead of allowing it to resolve itself into a million irrigating-ditches, has been the fight of the centuries. The trouble is that irrigation is not an end it is just a beginning.
The most interesting of these cliff-dwellings had pathetic little ribbon-like strips of garden on narrow terraces, where irrigating-water could be carried to them most romantic of sky-gardens, but eloquent of hard times. In recesses along the river and on the first plateau flats above its gorge were fields and gardens of considerable size, where irrigating-ditches may still be traced.
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