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So, fearless of gendarmes and soldiers, he lies down, in the blazing German afternoon, upon the shaly soil; and watches the bright-eyed lizards hunt flies along the roasting-walls, and the great locusts buzz and pitch and leap; green locusts with red wings, and grey locusts with blue wings; he notes the species, for he is tired and lazy, and has so many thoughts within his head, that he is glad to toss them all away, and give up his soul, if possible, to locusts and lizards, vines and shade.
Now, somewhere, somehow, sometime during his checkered career, Pig Head had heard, or read, of a way of catching golden eagles. He proceeded. Upon an unholy and cold shaly slope well up among the clouds, the mist, and the ptarmigan, Pig Head had hollowed him out a hollow, roomy enough for himself to crouch in. He was the sort of man that crouched and "grouched."
Then the bowmen of the fellowship fell to shooting at the wild men, while the men-at-arms breathed their horses, and the sumpter-beasts were gathered together behind them; for they had no dread of abiding there a while, whereas behind them the ground was broken into a steep shaly cliff, bushed here and there with tough bushes, so that no man could come up it save by climbing with hand and knee, and that not easily.
The sides of the earth fell away sharply, down, down. Betty shouted, and the empty echo of her voice came back to her. "The ground's so shaly and crumbly," she said thoughtfully, "that it would be impossible to let a man down with a rope the earth would cave in and bury him." "I think I see a diamond," reported Libbie. "Don't you see something glittering down there?"
At long intervals a group of foul and tumble-down Hottentot huts, with their squalid inhabitants lean curs and ape-like men; their raison d'être, in the shape of a flock of prematurely aged and disappointed-looking goats, trying all they are worth to extract sustenance from the red shaly earth and its sparse growth of coarse bush-like herbage.
Certainly that ought to be true if you have the stuff in you. And if you have not the stuff in you, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, Oxford, and all the universities of Germany cannot lift you an inch above your normal level. "You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" is our pithy and brutally truthful folk-saying. "What do you raise on these shaly hills?"
During the forenoon a small oasis is found among some low, shaly hills that give birth to a little stream, and consequent subsistence, to a few families of people; they live together inside a high mud-walled enclosure and cultivate a few small fields of grain.
They are of a soft, shaly composition, and are worn by the elements into all manner of queer, fantastic shapes; this, together with the same variegated colors observed yesterday afternoon, gives them a distinctive appearance not easily forgotten. They are " grand, gloomy, and peculiar; " especially are they peculiar.
This means solid rowing for the first sixty miles of our journey, with a current scarcely perceptible. The thought of it suggests lunch. At the mouth of Redstone Creek, a mile below Dunlap Creek, our port of departure, we turn in to a shaly beach at the foot of a wooded slope, in semi-rusticity, and fortify the inner man. A famous spot, this Redstone Creek.
After a time, the ground got steeper, and when they crossed the noisy beck and scrambled up a shaly bank, Kit was glad to see a broken wall loom among the tossing flakes. This was the shaft-house of an abandoned mine, and there was a sheep-fold, built with pulled-down material, close by. He shouted and waited until he heard the dogs bark and a rattle of stones.
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