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Updated: October 5, 2024
And it grew at a spot devoid of mosquitoes and gad-flies, and abounding in fruits and roots and water, and covered with green grass, and inhabited by the celestials and the Gandharvas, and of smooth surface, and naturally healthful, and beauteous and cool and of delicate feel.
The lumbering wagons were on their way from the Paraguayan mate fields, and had a load of over two thousand pounds each. Jolting over huge tree-trunks, or anon sinking in a swamp, followed by swarms of gad-flies, the patient animals wended their way.
"When the men came up the little one was perhaps rested, for it was able to turn round with its dam, no matter how quick she moved, so as to keep always in front of her belly. The five dogs were all the time frisking about her actively, tormenting her like so many gad-flies. Indeed they made it difficult to take an aim at her without killing them.
For hours together these fierce untameable beasts love to lie amidst the swampy reed-beds, wallowing up to their flanks in slimy malodorous mud and seemingly impervious to the ceaseless attacks of the local wasps and gad-flies, which try in vain to penetrate with their barbed stings the thick hairy covering of defence.
Let us have patience: perhaps we shall witness the nuptials. The hours go by; the Pangoniae and the Gad-flies desert my umbrella; the Scoliae grow weary and gradually disappear. It is finished. I shall see nothing more to-day. I repeat my laborious expedition to the Bois des Issards over and over again; and each time I see the males as assiduous as ever in skimming over the ground.
Understand the creature galled to death and desperation by gad-flies, cormorant-winged, worse than beset Inachus's daughter. Let him enjoy his fame for me, nor let me hint a whisper that shall dismount Bellerophon.
"Here," cried the captain to his savages, "take him and row him into the inlet; there leave him in the swamp; we'll see whether the gad-flies will not help his memory. You," continued the captain, "go with them, and give heed to this example." Five of the pirates, armed with pistols and swords, bound the wretched man, hand and foot, threw him into the boat and rowed into the inlet.
If he wanted to, he could make them tear home to the stable in wild flight, with their tails in the air, on the coldest October day, only by lying down in the grass and imitating the hum of gad-flies. But that was a tremendous secret, that even Father Lasse knew nothing about.
We had accomplished half the distance without seeing a single hoof; and I was beginning to congratulate myself upon our unusual luck, when a large red ox, maddened by the stings of the gad-flies, came headlong through the brush, tossing up the withered leaves and dried moss with his horns, and making directly towards us.
It seems it was sultry weather, piping-hot; the steed tormented into frenzy with gad-flies, long past being roadworthy: but safety and the interest of the house he rode for were incompatible things; a fall in serge cloth was expected; and a mad entrance they made of it. I look not with 'skew eyes into the deeds of heroes.
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