Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/650

 . 30, 1861.] 

with terrific screams, thousands upon thousands of thousands of these animals spread their wings and rushed frantically to and fro over and among the bare branches of the trees. The sky was shut out, practically, from our gaze by their vast numbers and immense spread of wing. It was more like what the sudden opening of Mrs. Gamp’s umbrella might be over Queen Mab than anything mortal to which I can liken it; and almost quite as wonderful was the fact that although we knew they were almost blind by daylight, yet they never touched each other in their crossing and wheeling. The natives picked up the dead, and certainly the head was that of a fox to all intents and appearance, while some of them stretched over five feet between the wings. The females had their young under their armpits, clinging by their little hooks, and most strange it was to watch this arrangement of nature as they wheeled just over our heads. While we examined them the umbrella was gradually collapsing; they were recovering their alarm, and settling again on the branches to sleep, hooking on most skilfully at the end of the wing joint, and then reversing into their own law of gravity, tail up head down, at once. In a very few minutes all was silent and quiet. We opened the living umbrella once more, and then beat a retreat out of the city; where, to say the truth, the atmosphere, filled with a fœtid odour of the strong-smelling animal, impregnated with the impalpable guano dust, began to be quite insupportable. Crossing the rice-field to the village close at hand, under a tamarind, breakfast awaited us. We thanked the Doctor for this attention, surmising that he was the Melibœus “quis nobis hæc otia fecit.”

The walk back was as nothing to the fatigue of coming, for the brisk sea-breeze blew in our faces, and that, I consider, makes at any time a difference of ten degrees. We shot at paddy-birds, snipe, and in the wood at jungle-fowl, though these latter beautiful but wary game were far too wide-awake for us to make much of a bag. Then we talked of the strange sight we had seen up to the very door of the bungalow, and no sooner had we bathed and swallowed a glass of Bass (what nectar it was!) than we lay, all but as to position, like our victims of the morning, sound as tops.

But the event of the day, which I fancy stereotyped it in the memory of my friends, was yet to come. Just as the fireflies lighted their emerald lamps, in came David to prepare for dinner, and at the same moment we saw some three or four men with trays on their heads, who salaamed on entering, and said—

“Doctor, sent master one curry.”

Bravo! thought I, the medico is a trump; he never did things by halves, for there was not only the curry, but a plentiful supply of rice, white as snow, and distinct in grain as if it never had been boiled, with numberless little saucers, containing lime, sambac, pickle, mango, peppers, and half a dozen other condiments to vary the flavour of our pièce de résistance. This we at once attacked, and I was, to tell the truth, disappointed, for the meat, cut into small squares, was dark, hard, and strongly flavoured.

“What is it?” said Dan, as he mixed up various pickles with the mass.

“I can hardly say; he very often sends me curries; probably game; perhaps a hare.”