iefs and priests. As it was, the
chiefs were compelled to keep cleared patches of sand for it, and to
fence out the dogs. It buried its eggs two feet deep, depending on the
heat of the sun for the hatching. And it would dig and lay, and continue
to dig and lay, while a black dug out its eggs within two or three feet
of it.

The laying-yard was Bashti's. During the season, he lived almost
entirely on megapode eggs. On rare occasion he even had megapodes that
were near to finishing their laying killed for his kai-kai. This was no
more than a whim, however, prompted by pride in such exclusiveness of
diet only possible to one in such high place. In truth, he cared no more
for megapode meat than for any other meat. All meat tasted alike to him,
for his taste for meat was one of the vanished pleasures in the limbo of
memory.

But the eggs! He liked to eat them. They were the only article of food
he liked to eat, They gave him reminiscent thrills of the ancient food-
desires of his youth. Actually was he hungry when he had megapode eggs,
and the well-nigh dried founts of saliva and of internal digestive juices
were stimulated to flow again at contemplation of a megapode egg prepared
for the eating. Wherefore, he alone of all Somo, barred rigidly by
taboo, ate megapode eggs. And, since the taboo was essentially
religious, to Agno was deputed the ecclesiastical task of guarding and
cherishing and caring for the royal laying-yard.

But Agno was no longer young. The acid bite of belly desire had long
since deserted him, and he, too, ate from a sense of duty, all meat
tasting alike to him. Megapode eggs only stung his taste alive and
stimulated the flow of his juices. Thus it was that he broke the taboos
he imposed, and, privily, before the eyes of no man, woman, or child ate
the eggs he stole from Bashti's private preserve.

So it was, as the laying season began, and when both Bashti and Agno were
acutely egg-yearning after six months of abstinence, that Agno led Jerry
along the taboo path through the mangroves, where they stepped from root
to root above the muck that ever steamed and stank in the stagnant air
where the wind never penetrated.

The path, which was not an ordinary path and which consisted, for a man,
in wide strides from root to root, and for a dog in four-legged leaps and
plunges, was new to Jerry. In all his ranging of Somo, because it was so
unusual a path, he had never discovered it. The u