Page:In Desert and Wilderness (Sienkiewicz, tr. Drezmal).djvu/299

 Rh meat deposited the previous night disappeared. It might indeed have been carried away by some jackal, but the Mzimu might assume the shape of a jackal.

Kali informed Stas of this propitious incident; the latter, however, stared at him as if he did not understand him at all and went on further. Passing a clump of shrubs in which he did not find any guinea-fowl, he drew nearer the river. Its banks were overgrown with tall trees from which were suspended like long stockings the nests of titmice, beautiful little yellow birds with black wings, and also wasps' nests resembling big roses, but colored like gray blotting-paper. In one place the river formed an expansion a few score paces wide, overgrown in part by papyrus. On this expansion aquatic birds always swarmed. There were storks just like our European storks, and storks with thick bills ending with a hook, and birds black as velvet, with legs red as blood, and flamingoes and ibises, and white spoon-bills with bills like spoons, and cranes with crowns on their heads, and a multitude of curlews, variegated and gray as mice, flying quickly back and forth as if they were tiny sylvan sprites on long, thin, snipe-like legs.

Stas killed two large ducks, beautiful, cinnamon colored, and treading upon dead butterflies, of which thousands strewed the bank, he first looked around carefully to see whether there were any crocodiles in the shallows, after which he waded into the water and lifted his quarry. The shots had dispersed the birds; there remained only two marabous, standing between ten and twenty paces away and plunged in reverie. They were like two old men with bald heads pressed between the shoulders. They did not move at all. The boy gazed for a while at the loathsome fleshy pouches hanging from their breasts, and afterwards, observing that the wasps were beginning