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Updated: June 18, 2025
Before long they came in sight of the Erba Molle; it looked like a fair, peaceful pasture, with thousands of sword rushes golden upon its surface. The light of the stars, which was now brilliant, shone upon its verdure; there were great flocks of water-birds at roost around it, and they rose with shrill cries and great noise of wings, with a roar as though a tide were rising.
Tall cranes, pelicans, ibises, and other large water-birds rose occasionally from the ponds, and fanned themselves slowly away. On portions of the road the telegraph wires, running parallel with the track, were covered with tiny birds of indigo-blue, decked with long slim tail-feathers.
Now and then, we disturbed alligators along the banks, and we were told that snakes were abundant in the grass. The quantity of water-birds was astonishing great and small white herons, large blue herons, little blue herons, the curious, dark wry-necks, and ducks by thousands.
The water-birds came back from their upward flight and settled again on the swamp. Underneath it all was still, save for the loud croaking of the frogs. Don Silverio rose with the dawn of day, and entered his church at five of the clock. There were but a few women gathered in the gaunt, dark vastness of the nave.
At their mouths were V-shaped weirs of stakes, driven into the bottom and wattled together with flexible twigs. These were open at the mouth, and in the openings were set dip-nets, which could be lowered into the water. The lagoon abounded in water-birds of many kinds, and hardly had we entered it, when Louis shot a pretty, small white heron.
To the right was a mill, with a great pond thick with bulrushes and water-lilies, full of water-birds, coots and moorhens, which swam about, uttering plaintive cries.
They were debating, and had nearly recognized the propriety of falling back without challenging a combat or venturing their heads further into the tiger's mouth, when something a flight of water-birds, a reconnaissance in force, a rumour, or what not produced a panic, and before a blow had been struck, the Taira army was in full retreat for Kyoto.
Their eyes wandered, sometimes, over the track of the foam, and in their minds they saw again the water-birds plashing among lotus plants, and heard the ancient Egyptian litanies softly chanted behind the propylons of a temple built by some king two thousand years departed.
The birds continue to increase and to become more like those of our day; their tails shrink away, their long bills lose their teeth; they are mostly water-birds of large size, and there are none of our songsters yet; still they are for the first time perfect birds, and no longer half-lizard in their nature.
In the warm morning light they gathered or dispersed before the advancing vessel, which some of them almost touched with the plumage of their evergreens; and where none of them were large, some were so small that it would not have been too bold to figure them as a vaster race of water-birds assembling and separating in her course.
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