Page:Under the Sun.djvu/110

86 would have called it a “portmanteau word.” And we gave the crows commissions as Lieutenant-Governors from Her Majesty Queen Victoria, quamdiu se bene gesserint. And then we went on to another island, a long one with a tree in the middle. And under the tree stood a white calf, so we knew at once that this was a water-calf. For there was no land it could have come from within sight, and no human being but ourselves within a mile of it on either side. And at night when thieves bring their boats to steal what they consider quite an ordinary calf, deserted, they think, by its owner when the swift flood overtook him, the calf no doubt dives under the water, and thus evades them.

The rest of the islands were deserted. The ruins of houses and temples, waist-deep in water, showed that within recent times there had been inhabitants of this strange and beautiful archipelago. Icthyophagi no doubt. There was nothing else for them to eat. But just now the birds were alone. All round us the kingfishers (long may ye live before ye become poor men’s barometers!) poised in the air, and, wild as the cry of the wild ass in the Bikanir deserts, came to us the scream of the fishing-hawk. But no — the birds were not alone. The flood had driven from the earth its multitude of creeping folk: snakes hung across the forks of trees, or basked on the branches; centipedes crawled upon floating rubbish; and many bushes were black to every tip with thronging ants. In one tree-hollow we surprised strange company — a pair of gorgeous dhaman snakes, three bran-new centipedes bright as copper, a most villainous-looking spider, and a gem of a frog, a little metallic creature that showed among the foul crew