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Noon found them still searching for some pocket of stale rain-water; but once only did they discover the slightest trace of moisture a crust of slime in a rocky basin, and from it a blind lizard was slowly creeping a heavy, lustreless, crippled thing that toiled aimlessly and painfully up the rock, only to slide back into the slime again, leaving a trail of iridescent moisture where its sagging belly dragged.
He took advantage of every high tide to strip the reefs of everything that the ship-wreck had distributed among them. He went from rock to rock, picking up whatever the sea had scattered tatters of sail-cloth, pieces of iron, splinters of panels, shattered planking, broken yards; here a beam, there a chain, there a pulley. He lived upon limpets, hermit-crabs, and rain-water.
The sea was kept out by a magnificent system of dykes under the daily superintendence of a board of officers, called dyke-graves, while the rain-water, which might otherwise have drowned the soil thus painfully reclaimed, was pumped up by windmills and drained off through sluices opening and closing with the movement of the tides. The province of Zeeland was one vast "polder."
Even the rain-water, as well as the water we had brought with us, we had drained to the last drop. The weather continually alternated from a dead calm to a light breeze: the wind frequently shifted, but I had no strength left to attend to the sail the boat was abandoned to its own guidance, or rather to that of the wind.
There was a little court within, around which the house was built, with a well for rain-water in the middle, after the fashion that was half Roman and half Eastern.
A canal is to lead the waters toward that part of the coast which is opposite the island of Guayguaza. The salt-works of Porto Cabello somewhat resemble those of the peninsula of Araya, near Cumana. The earth, however, which they lixivate by collecting the rain-water into small basins, contains less salt.
This squirrel carried nuts all day and stored them in the end of a drainpipe that discharged the rain-water upon the pavement below. The nuts obeyed the same law that the rain-water did, and all rolled through the pipe and fell upon the sidewalk.
Doubling round some thick bushes, which obscured him from our view, he found himself beside a small pool of rain-water, just deep enough to cover his body; into this he walked, and, facing about, lay gently down and awaited our on-coming, with nothing but his old, gray face, and massive horns above the water, and these concealed from view by the overhanging herbage.
The rains, the winds and the waves, the complexity and the fitfulness of nature, are always before him. His work is not yet in being, and he must foresee its influence: how it shall deflect the tide, exaggerate the waves, dam back the rain-water, or attract the thunderbolt.
On arriving, we saw that it was a circular wall or dam of clay, nearly five feet high, with a segment open to the south to admit and retain the rain-water that occasionally flows over the flat into this artificial receptacle. In spite of old Jimmy's asseverations, there was only sufficient water to last one or two days, and what there was, was very thick and whitish-coloured.
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