CHAPTER XVI

Summary

NEAR this town we spent an entire day among the out-of-doors people, as it was better situated than other places we had sailed by, similarly located on muddy mounds. There were patches of wheat for home consumption; tolerably large rice fields, loved haunts of the snipe—made and in process of manufacture by scores of naked men who stole and scooped the slimy earth from below the water, and bound it with bundles of reeds, flags, or millet-stalk; there were good gardens admirably cultivated, and stocked with those vegetables and fruits that grow best in this almost tropical summer; and there were also good houses of brick, and fine healthy inmates to look at.

There was some sport going on—for away at least a mile or two the dull booming of heavy firearms was incessant, as if an active engagement was being fought; so to observe it better, if not to share in it, we had to hire a small shallop, poled by a rusty-moustached old man who knew the country well, like an old huntsman, and who could make his rounds to the easiest fences of reeds or rushes, and by a dexterous push and a jerk of the skiff, clear them cleverly. We were amazed.

Every foot of swamp was converted into something or another more mysterious, more fantastic, and more unmeaning, as we went on poling and paddling over all kinds of infernal machines and comical contrivances reared up from the water, lying in the water, or fixed in the weedy bottom.