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Sheltered by rocks, and in this part winding through the greenest banks, enamelled with a thousand wild flowers and water-weeds, went the crystal Sorgia. Advancing farther, the landscape assumed a more sombre and sterile aspect. The valley seemed enclosed or shut in by fantastic rocks of a thousand shapes, down which dashed and glittered a thousand rivulets.
The men are sleeping among the trees, some on the ground, and some in grass-hammocks slung between the stems. All is silent, save the heavy plunge of the tapir in the river, as he tears up the water-weeds for his night's repast.
The black water boiled, and the trout went straight down and sulked. I merely held on, till at last it seemed "time for us to go," and by cautious tugging I got him through the reedy jungle, and "gruppit him," as the Shepherd would have said. He was simply but decently wrapped round, from snout to tail, in very fine water-weeds, as in a garment.
There was more labour than excitement in the task; but the course along the lane of water was not entirely uneventful, for a moor-hen was startled from her nest in a half-liquid patch of bog, above which rose quite a tuft of coarse herbage; and farther on, just as Dick thrust in his pole to give it a good wriggle and splash, there was a tremendous swirl, and a huge pike literally shot out of the water, describing an arc, and after rising fully four feet from the surface dropped head-first among the tangled water-weeds and reedy growth, through which it could be seen to wriggle and force its way farther and farther, the waving reeds and bubbling water between showing the direction in which it had gone.
"You are surely not going to spoil the fun," said Trudel. "Come along; I'm going to get in first. I can swim, you know!" "But not in mud and water-weeds," said Lottchen wisely. The boys began to laugh at them. "Why, you're funky, I do believe; the pond isn't really deep anywhere," they said.
I showed my companions where I had found the handkerchief, and pointed to two or three footsteps, impressed into the clayey margin, and tending towards the water. Beneath its shallow verge, among the water-weeds, there were further traces, as yet unobliterated by the sluggish current, which was there almost at a standstill.
Oh, the joyful place of streams! River and leat and back-water here ran clear among willow-clad islands, all fringed deep with meadow-sweet and comfrey and butterbur and melilot. The sun shone overhead among big, white, racing clouds; the fish poised in mysterious pools among trailing water-weeds; and there was soon no room in my heart for anything but the joy of earth and the beauty of it.
In all cases there was a ditch, full of water, close at hand, stagnant, and often quite covered with a growth of water-weeds, very unwholesome, one would think, in the neighborhood of a dwelling; and, in truth, the children and grown people did look pale.
We lunched and took our midday siesta under a wide-spreading sycamore by the stream, after walking up alongside the lakes for nearly two miles; fat milch cows, not unlike our own, were feeding by the rushing stream; birds of all descriptions filled the branches of the trees, water-hens and herons and ducks were in abundance on one of the lakes, bulrushes and water-weeds grew in them; it would be an ideal little spot in any country, but in Arabia it was a marvel.
It was a land where it seemed as if it must be always summer and generally afternoon, a land where bees hummed among the wild thyme and in the flower beds of cottage gardens, where the harvest-mice rustled amid the corn and nettles, and the mill-race flowed cool and silent through water-weeds and dark tunnelled sluices, and made soft droning music with the wooden mill-wheel.
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