Part 9 (2/2)

”Water!” shouted Mark, and Bevis came to him. Deep down in a narrow channel there was the merest trickle of shallow water, but running, and clear as crystal. It came from chalk, and it was limpid. Pan could drink, but they could not. His hollow tongue lapped it up like a spoon; but it was too shallow to scoop up in the palm of the hand, and they had no tube of ”gix,” or reed, or oat straw, or b.u.t.tercup stalk to suck through. They sprang into the channel itself, alighting on a place the water did not cover, but with the stream under their feet they could not drink. Nothing but a sparrow could have done so.

Presently Bevis stooped, and with his hands scratched away the silt which formed the bottom, a fine silt of powdered chalk, almost like quicksand, till he had made a bowl-like cavity. The stream soon filled it, but then the water was thick, being disturbed, and they had to wait till it had settled. Then they lapped too, very carefully, with the hollow palm, taking care that the water which ran through their fingers should fall below, and not above the bowl, or the weight of the drops would disturb it again. With perseverance they satisfied their thirst; then they returned to the oak, and took out their provisions; they could eat now.

”This is a jolly jungle,” said Mark, with his mouth full.

”That's a banyan,” said Bevis, pointing with the knuckle-end of the drum-stick he was gnawing at the oak over them. ”It's about eleven thousand years old.”

Then Mark took the drum-stick, and had his turn at it. When it was polished, Pan had it: he cracked it across with his teeth, just as the hyenas did in the cave days, for the animals never learnt to split bones, as the earliest men did. Pan cracked it very disconsolately: his heart was with the fleshpots.

Boom!

They starred. It was the same peculiar sound they had heard before, and seemed to come from an immense distance. A pheasant crowed as he heard it in the jungle close by them, and a second farther away.

”What can it be?” whispered Mark. ”Is there anything here?”--glancing around.

”There may be some genii,” said Bevis quietly. ”Very likely there are some genii: they are everywhere. But I do not know what that was.

Listen!”

They listened: the wood was still; so still, they could hear a moth or a chafer entangled in the leaves of the oak overhead, and trying to get out. Looking up there, the sky was blue and clear, and the sunlight fell brightly on the open s.p.a.ce by the streamlet. There was nothing but the hum. The long, long summer days seem gradually to dispose the mind to expect something unusual. Out of such an expanse of light, when the earth is tangibly in the midst of a vast illumined s.p.a.ce, what may not come?--perhaps something more than is common to the senses. The mind opens with the enlarging day.

It is said the sandhills of the desert under the noonday sun emit strange sounds; that the rocky valleys are vocal; the primeval forest speaks in its depths; hollow ocean sends a muttering to the becalmed vessel; and up in the mountains the bound words are set loose. Of old times the huntsmen in our own woods met the noonday spirit under the leafy canopy.

Bevis and Mark listened, but heard nothing, except the entangled chafer, the midsummer hum, and, presently, Pan snuffling, as he buried his nostrils in his hair to bite a flea. They laughed at him, for his eyes were staring, and his flexible nostrils turned up as if his face was not alive but stuffed. The boom did not come again, so they finished their dinner.

”I feel jolly lazy,” said Mark. ”You ought to put the things down on the map.”

”So I did,” said Bevis, and he got out his brown paper, and Mark held it while he worked. He drew Fir-Tree Gulf and the Nile.

”Write that there is a deep hole there,” said Mark, ”and awful crocodiles: that's it. Now Africa--you want a very long stroke there; write reeds and bamboos.”

”No, not bamboos, papyrus,” said Bevis. ”Bamboos grow in India, where we are now. There's some,” pointing to a tall wild parsnip, or ”gix,”

on the verge of the streamlet.

”I'm so lazy,” said Mark. ”I shall go to sleep.”

”No you won't,” said Bevis. ”I ought to go to sleep, and you ought to watch. Get your spear, and now take my bow.”

Mark took the bow sullenly.

”You ought to stand up, and walk up and down.”

”I can't,” said Mark very short.

”Very well; then go farther away, where you can see more round you.

There, sit down there.”

Mark sat down at the edge of the shadow of the oak. ”Don't you see you can look into the channel; if there are any savages they are sure to creep up that channel. Do you see?”

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