Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/252

242 bringing their supplies in canoes to market. Squatting by the banks of many of the rice fields were natives armed with guns with which to kill the numerous birds that eat the young growing rice. The Betsiboka River is here about fifty feet wide in the dry season, but so high and powerful does it become in the wet season that it has to be restrained in its bed by a huge levee of earth some fifty feet in width. On the top of this lay our road for many miles. The other great embankments crossing the plain were nearly covered with mud-walled dwellings. We next reached the banks of the Ikopa, here only a muddy stream about fifty feet wide but one of the largest rivers of Madagascar, whose general course I was now to follow, though at some distance to the eastward, until I reached the sea. I soon left the plain and entered upon a country similar in general character to that found east of the capital, except that the treeless moors were smoother and the road far better. For a long way I enjoyed fine views of Antananarivo, sitting proudly upon her Acropolis, and then, crossing a high ridge, she was gone, to be seen by me no more. Afterward we passed at some distance a great bazaar or weekly market like the Zoma of the metropolis, being held on the top of one of the great smooth downs. The thousands of white shrouded figures collected there were a queer sight. I stopped to eat my lunch in a little roadside hut, and rested upon a comfortable mattress made of palm-leaf ribs and covered with straw matting. On the wall hung a sort of fiddle, with two strings stretched upon a small gourd. The doorway of this hut was only three feet in height, and I had almost to go on "all fours" in order to enter. A very old decrepit woman was the only one about, though I had noticed others in other huts. The sole occupations of these poor old creatures consist in sitting in the sun and gazing at nothing, or, while lying half asleep on a mat, in driving chickens from the rooms with a long pole or with simple hisses. As the doors are always wide open and the fowls always in search of scraps of food, the crones are not idle, at least when inside the huts. No one seems to pay any attention to these reminiscences of humanity, and they themselves appear to wait only for reluctant Nature to dissolve. Going on, there were many outcroppings of granite now to be seen and many curiously shaped erratic bowlders. One hill looked like the round dome of an observatory, another like an ordinary haystack. Everywhere possible rice terraces were placed, and there were many small cultivated fields, but before night the country had become quite deserted, and the road after those to which I had been accustomed was positively lonesome. The strong, pitiless wind which unobstructed sweeps these moors added to this feeling. Traveling at this season is very trying also, for as you sit so long in your filanzana you are chilled and