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Updated: June 21, 2025
That failing, he takes to creeping through the water-grass, like a mink, and striking his game dead with a blow of his paw. Or he finds a porcupine loafing through the woods, and follows him about to throw dirt and stones at him, carefully refraining from touching him the while, till the porcupine rolls himself into a ball of bristling quills, his usual method of defense.
Such was Yandjali, and beyond Yandjali lay the forest, and in front of Yandjali flowed the river, and years ago boom-boom down the river's shining surface, from away up there where the great palms gave place to reeds and water-grass, you might have heard the sound of the hippopotami bellowing to the sun, a deep organ note, unlike the sound emitted by any other creature on earth.
Two miles farther we came to a fine large water-hole, surrounded by Polygonums and young water-grass, and, at two miles farther, to another, and in about the same distance to a third. Recent camps of the natives were on each of them, and a beaten path led from one to the other. One of these holes was crossed by a weir made of sticks for catching fish.
"Am I an eel?" he roared, "that I should live on water-grass, and red gravel?" Then the priest, terrified at the behaviour of this strange divinity, picked up the offending gem to the presence of which he attributed his anger and fled, never looking behind him. Juanna and Francisco were seized with uncontrollable laughter, while even Soa deigned to smile. But Leonard did not smile.
Outside these, bright water-grass of the liveliest green was creeping, tempting any unwary foot to step, and plunge, and founder. And on the marge were blue campanula, sundew, and forget-me-not, such as no child could resist. On either side, the hill fell back, and the ground was broken with tufts of rush, and flag, and mares-tail, and a few rough alder-trees overclogged with water.
A violent wind acting upon the high waving plain of sugar-cane grass may suddenly create a change; sometimes islands are detached by the gambols of a herd of hippopotami, whose rude rambles during the night, break narrow lanes through the floating plains of water-grass, and separate large masses from the main body.
When I pushed my canoe through the fringe of water-grass on the point nearest the loons, they were scattered in a long line, twelve or fifteen of them, extending from the head of the bay to a point nearly opposite me. At the other end of the line two loons were swimming about, doing something which I could not make out. Suddenly the loon talk ceased.
His mouth opened widely, and his body swayed at times. The little man and the peak stared in silence. A lazy lake lay asleep near the foot of the mountain. In its bed of water-grass some frogs leered at the sky and crooned. The sun sank in red silence, and the shadows of the pines grew formidable.
No tree or rock or bush offered any concealment to an enemy; the ducks could sleep there as sure of detecting the approach of danger as if on the open ocean. One autumn day I passed the place and, looking cautiously over the top of a hill, saw a single black duck swim out of the water-grass at the edge of the pond.
Even the crystal "shutt" that crosses the farmyard by the woodrick, and glides down an aqueduct of last year's bark for Mary to fill the kettle from; and even the tricklets that have no organs for telling or knowing their business, but only get into unwary oozings in and among the water-grass, and there make moss and forget themselves among it one and all, they come to the same thing at last, and that is the river.
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