Page:Under the Sun.djvu/105

Rh stands watching. He sees them climb out on the other side, one behind the other, sees their broad backs sloped against the hill before him. Then they reach the top and lowing break into a trot, disappearing gladly behind the mud walls which contain their food; and the herdsman turns and trudges the circuit of the invading water.

One year the Ganges and the Jumna conspired together to flood the province, and suddenly swelling over their banks, desolated in a night half the busy city of Allahabad. We brought our boat up to the new lagoons, and for a whole day sailed about among nameless islands, great groves of bird-deserted trees, and the ruins of many villages, amid scenes as strange and as beautiful as we shall ever see again. The Maruts, armed with their hundred-jointed bolts, and the stormgod Peru, of the thunder-black hair and beard of lightning-gold, who goes rumbling over the midnight clouds astride a millstone — and all the little hearth-spirits quake at his going and fear falls upon the house — had been abroad for many days. And the river-gods were up at their bidding, and the clouds poured into the rivers, and the rivers drove down to the sea. And before the pitiless rush of the flood, what difference between man and beast? All of them rats alike, poor creeping folk, flooded out of their holes. The same wind and rain tore the crow’s nest from the tree and the roof from the native’s hut; the same flood carried the two away together. The tiger, the man, and the woodlouse were all on one platform, and that which crept highest was the best among them.

Starting in our boat from the spot where once four cross-roads had met, we crossed over towards the belt of trees that hides the city from sight as you look