ither the Burman's dah or the elephant's trunk cleared them off
us.

The first pool was lit by a golden shaft of light through the greenery,
rising fish were breaking its smooth weedy surface, but duck there were
none; so we plunged on in the silence in another direction, came out
into the kaing grass again, left the comparatively open forest behind
us, and entered a trackless sea of reeds, which closed round us thickly
on all sides.

[Illustration]

The elephant surged through this steadily, waving its trunk in front,
then pressing the reeds to right and left, or raising it high, and
pulling down masses that threatened to sweep us off the pad. The dust
and the heat of the sun overhead, and the monotony of the surging sound
was a little oppressive.--It reminded me of moments long ago, in smaller
reeds, and a small boy hunting duck round a loch in Perthshire; the
stuffy, closed-in feeling, the crashing of the reeds, and the silence
when you stopped to listen. Here we paused too, now and again, and the
Burman stood up on the pad and tried to get our bearings. We got pretty
well lost, I believe. Then on we went, the huge beast crushing through
the endless savannahs, as at home in its reeds as a liner surging
through pathless seas. The motion and sound kept going all night in my
dreams, the slow rolling of vast bones and muscles under the pad, and
the crash of the reeds giving way, and the swish as they closed behind
us. Here, as in the jungle, pretty blue convolvuli twisted up dead reeds
nearly to our level, and peeped up at the sun. When we finally struck
the long-sought for pools there were no duck, leastwise, but two, and
some snake-birds, as they call a cormorant here that has a neck like an
S. Round the edges the grass had been regularly grazed, so I'd bet on a
shot there for one who could wait, but, apart from the shot, what would
one not give for the pleasure of watching some of Burmah's beasts in
their natural state. We were both a little tired by the time we got back
in the afternoon to the path to the river, and an hour or two after,
when we crossed the sands, and slid off our elephant's back at the
river's edge, we had to take kinks out of our lower extremities, and
even our elephant seemed very exhausted as it stood in the shallows, and
slowly lifted water in its trunk and squirted it into its mouth. She and
her mahout lodged the night on the far side.

As we crossed the river in our canoes, the sun was set