Page:Under the Sun.djvu/102

78 past, jostling each other with ill-balanced and gawky gestures. And now they have reached the water. How they bob their heads and plume their feathers, turning their beaks over their backs and quackering in subdued tones! In their element they grow courageous, for the communist crow who has left his shelter to see “what on earth those ducks can have got,” and who has settled near them, is promptly charged, beak lowered, by the drake, who waggles his curly tail in pride as the evil fowl goes flapping away.

But let the ducks quacker their short lives out in the garden puddles — the carrion crow is off to the river, for the great river is in flood, and many a choice morsel, it knows, is floating down to the sea. Videlicet the succulent kid; guinea-fowls surprised on their nests by the sudden water; young birds that had sat chirping for help on bush and stone as the flood rose up and up, the parent birds fluttering round, powerless to help and wild with protracted sorrow; snakes which hiding in their holes had hoped to tire out the water, but which, when the banks gave way, were swept struggling out into the current; the wild cat’s litter, which the poor mother with painful toil had carried into the deepest cranny of the rock, drowned in a cluster, and floating down the river to the muggurs.

The muggur is a gross pleb, and his features stamp him low-born. His manners are coarse. The wading heifer has hardly time to utter one terror-stricken groan ere she is below the crimson-bubbled water. Woe to the herdsman if he leads his kine across the ford. The water-fowl floating on the river, the patient ibis, the grave sarus-cranes, fare ill if they tempt the squalid