Always in the sluggishly drifting,
opaque water were eddyings and stirrings; little rushes of bubbles came
chuckling up light-heartedly from this or that submerged conflict and
tragedy; now and again were crocodiles like a stranded fleet of logs
basking in the sun. Still it was by day, a dreary stillness broken only
by insect sounds and the creaking and flapping of our progress, by the
calling of the soundings and the captain's confused shouts; but in
the night as we lay moored to a clump of trees the darkness brought a
thousand swampy things to life and out of the forest came screaming and
howlings, screaming and yells that made us glad to be afloat. And once
we saw between the tree stems long blazing fires. We passed two or three
villages landward, and brown-black women and children came and stared at
us and gesticulated, and once a man came out in a boat from a creek and
hailed us in an unknown tongue; and so at last we came to a great open
place, a broad lake rimmed with a desolation of mud and bleached refuse
and dead trees, free from crocodiles or water birds or sight or sound
of any living thing, and saw far off, even as Nasmyth had described, the
ruins of the deserted station, and hard by two little heaps of buff-hued
rubbish under a great rib of rock, the quap! The forest receded.
Pages:
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562
563
564
565
566
567
568
569
570
571