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Updated: May 8, 2025
When Moschus lamented that the mallow, the anise, and the parsley had a fresh birth every year, whilst we men sleep in the hollow earth a long, unbounded, never-waking sleep, he told us what your modern materialist tells us, and he re-echoed the lamentation which, long before Greece had a literature at all, had been heard beneath Chaldean stars and along the mud-banks of the Nile.
"And although they look sluggish enough when sprawling on mud-banks, half-asleep in the sun, you would be surprised to see them go after fish, which is their principal food. Their favourite haunts are the deep rugged banks of a river or lake overhung with trees, where they can hide themselves and watch for prey. It is not only in water that they are dangerous.
But bayonet-charges cannot carry stone walls or mud-banks; and in the face of the almost incessant peppering of breech-loaders, rushes of the kind have become slightly old-fashioned. To the Carlists, in any case, was due the credit of readiness to have recourse to the steel whenever there was a rift for hand-to-hand fighting.
"You never want to go on them games now you've got that black chap." "Oh, I'll go with you any time, if you'll come." "Too busy, sir, too busy. Going to get a gun?" "Yes, I'll go and see. It may be a big one. Colonel Preston's man told me there are some very big ones up the river on the mud-banks." "Yes, sir, but nobody ever sees them."
From this last stroke the industry, enfeebled by the lessened demand for its chief product, and by the greater cost and length of voyages resulting from the growing scarcity of whales, never recovered. To-day its old-time ports are deserted by traffic. Stripped of all that had salable value, its ships rot on mud-banks or at moldering wharves.
No other views but those, and no definite forms rising out of the water save great forest trees, growing so densely that no daylight shines through the black roof of branches. Imagine the life of our forefathers, who fled here from an existence so much more dreadful that they clung to the mud-banks and fought for them, a never-ending battle with the sea.
The drainage, however, is very much improved of late years, and the magnificent river embankments have done much to obviate the malaria arising from mud-banks. Skating Death and funeral of Deák Deák's policy Uneasiness about the rise of the Danube Great excitement about inundations The capital in danger Night scene on the embankment Firing the danger-signal The great calamity averted.
The song-birds vied with those of gorgeous plume. Water-birds disported themselves in the mud-banks and sloughs. The smaller birds seemed to pay little attention to the nearness of the hawks. Kingfisher perched on limbs overhanging the quiet pools, ready to drop at the faintest movement on the opaque water; the road-runner chased the festive lizard on the desert land back of the willows.
Across the river to the west lay the level, swampy, fertile wastes known as the Chaco, still given over either to the wild Indians or to cattle-ranching on a gigantic scale. The broad river ran in curves between mud-banks where terraces marked successive periods of flood. A belt of forest stood on each bank, but it was only a couple of hundred yards wide.
He did not like to go poking about the house, so he contemplated the mud-banks and the mud-river and the mangrove forest, and cursed the agent. The country was very quiet. There are few things in the world quieter than a West African forest in the daytime. It is obtrusively, emphatically quiet. It does not let you forget how singularly quiet it is.
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