Page:Malay Sketches.pdf/111

 between low slimy banks, and right and left the eye wanders over a desolation of glistening mud with an almost imperceptible slope to the edge of the distant sea.

Pools of shallow water and tiny channels, through which the receding tide finds easier road to river or sea, alone break the monotony of the unsightly waste.

That is as far as physical features go. The mud-flats have their denizens, but they are not over-attractive.

First, there is the Malay fisherman, hunting for mussels and other shell-fish. If he is there at all he will be hard to see, for he pushes his little dug- out fifty or a hundred yards up a mud creek, leaves it and fossicks about, sunk above his knees in the mire.

Then there are myriads of birds, attracted by the great possibilities of gain to the industrious searcher after garbage, stranded fish, and all sorts of particularly loathsome-looking and foul-smelling dead things to be found in such a place. These birds are often strange-looking creatures, vast of size, long and lank of leg, snaky of neck and spiky of bill. But they are wary to a degree, they always seems to be standing just in the tiny ripple of the smallest wavelets