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Across the broad waters of the Shatt-el-Arab there stretches a lonely strip of country bounded by a wall of palm-tops. Like all the land here it is cultivated as long as it borders the river and thickly planted with date groves. Then lies a nondescript belt that just divides the desert from the sown, and then, a mile or so inland, scorched and unprofitable wilderness.
Scar-like rocks striated the jungle clothing the foothills, and through the dancing air, viewed from the arid heights, they had the appearance of running water. "Swamps to the southeast showed like unhealing wounds upon the face of the landscape. Beyond them spread the lower river waters, the bank of the stream proper being discernible only by reason of a greater greenness in the palm-tops.
We took with us provisions for about fifty days; not full rations, for we hoped in part to live on the country on fish, game, nuts, and palm-tops. Our personal baggage was already well cut down: Cherrie, Kermit, and I took the naturalist's fly to sleep under, and a very light little tent extra for any one who might fall sick. Rondon, Lyra, and the doctor took one of their own tents.
We had only one aneroid to determine our altitude, and therefore could make merely a loose approximation to it, but we probably had between two and three times this descent in the aggregate of rapids ahead of us. So far the country had offered little in the way of food except palm-tops. We had lost four canoes and one man. We were in the country of wild Indians, who shot well with their bows.
So he thought and talked to himself, listening the while to the soft symphony of the swaying palm-tops and the subdued murmur of the surf as the rollers crashed on the distant line of reef away to leeward.
Sounded the cries of the teamsters, the barking of dogs, the mingled murmur of speech English speech again; and the fresh wind, bearing away a fine, golden dust from the long roads, swayed the palm-tops and the fern-trees with a gentle and caressing touch.
But I did more whether from mere animal destructiveness, or from the spark of humanity which was slowly rekindling in me, I began to delight in tearing up trees for its own sake. I tried my strength daily on thicker and thicker boles. I crawled up to the high palm-tops, and bowed them down by my weight.
Can you understand such a feeling? None of my colleagues can; their minds are in France, and they complain of a colonial exile, as if Tunisia were the Devil's Island; they call me an enthusiast, because I think well of this warm, palpitating soil in which I seem, I don't know how, to have struck deep roots." And he gazed lovingly over the sea of glossy palm-tops, down yonder, on our right.
A field of palm-tops stretched away from their feet to the sea. They told him the city of Bombay was hidden under those fronds. "And now you understand, Cadman," the Doctor was saying, "there's your own room and one next for your friend Hantee. Your traps will be up before you sleep, which may not be early, for I've a tamasha on for you this night you remember, I enjoy dinner in the morning?"
We had two meals a day, and were on rather short commons both our mess and the camaradas' except when we got plenty of palm-tops. For our mess we had the boxes chosen by Fiala, each containing a day's rations for six men, our number. But we made each box last a day and a half, or at times two days, and in addition we gave some of the food to the camaradas.
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