Phil Robinson

“ The novelty of wings soon palls upon the white ants; they find they are a snare, and try to get rid of them as soon as possible. They have not forgotten the first few minutes of their winged existence, when they were drifting on the wind with birds all round them, when so many of their brothers and sisters disappeared with a snap of a beak, and when they themselves were only saved from the same fate by being blown into a bush. ”

“ But let the ducks quacker their short lives out in the garden puddles — the carrion crow is off to the river, for the great river is in flood, and many a choice morsel, it knows, is floating down to the sea. Videlicet the succulent kid; guinea-fowls surprised on their nests by the sudden water; young birds that had sat chirping for help on bush and stone as the flood rose up and up, the parent birds fluttering round, powerless to help and wild with protracted sorrow ”

“ There were no parrot-ravaged crops, no muddy buff’aloes, no limping, sneaking pariah dogs to remind us of India. Even the kites, sailing in great circles above the broad sunlit water, did not seem the same birds that a few days before wheeled in hopes of offal round the village. The vulture on the palm-top was a very Jatayus among vultures. Where were we then but in Dreamland? A solitary palm — do you remember how Xerxes went out of his way with his army to do homage to the great plane-tree that queened it in the desert alone? — attracted us, and we sailed for it. All great trees grow alone. ”

“ And before the pitiless rush of the flood, what difference between man and beast? All of them rats alike, poor creeping folk, flooded out of their holes. The same wind and rain tore the crow’s nest from the tree and the roof from the native’s hut ”

“ From this refuge they saw their comrades pouring out of the hole in the mud wall, spreading their weak, wide wings, giving themselves up to the wind, — which gave them up to the kites wheeling and recurving amongst the fluttering swarm, to the crows, noisy and coarse even at their food, to the quick-darting mynas, and the graceful, sliding king-crow ”

“ A servant remembers something left out of doors, and with his master’s wrath very present to him, detaches his mouth from the hookah bowl, and with his foolish skirts tucked round his waist, paddles out into the rain, showing behind his plaited umbrella like a toadstool on its travels. A young pariah dog goes by less dusty and less miserable than usual. The rain has taken much of the curl out of his tail, but he is, and he knows it, safer in the rain. ”

“ But after a long interval come by the last birds, who have dawdled over that “one worm more” too long, calling out as they pass to their comrades far ahead to wait for them; and then, after another while, comes “the very last bird,” — for when the storm is at its worst, there is always one more to pass, flying too busily to speak, and scudding heavily across the sloping rain. The young crow meant to have seen the storm out, and so he kept his seat on the roof, and in the insolence of his glossy youth rallied his old relatives escaping from the wet ”

“ They can hardly waddle for joy, and stagger past, jostling each other with ill-balanced and gawky gestures. And now they have reached the water. How they bob their heads and plume their feathers, turning their beaks over their backs and quackering in subdued tones! ”

“ The earth shakes below the cavalier; this is no time to hesitate; shall he move? Yes; and plop! within an inch of his charmer’s nose he has landed in the puddle. But such accidents are infrequent; the cavalier, we regret to know, generally serenades all night. By day he sleeps beneath a stone, fitting himself into a dry hole, — for frogs dare not go out in the daytime. ”

“ The insect world, which during the hot weather was held in such small account, now holds itself supreme. Convinced themselves that entomology is the finest study in the world, the insects carry their doctrine at their tails’ point to convince others. Every one must learn and be quite clear about the difference between a black mosquito with grey spots, and a grey mosquito with black spots. There must be no confusion between a fly which stings you if you touch it, and a fly which if it touches you stings. No one can pretend to ignore the insect invaders — the bullety beetles and maggoty ants. ”

“ But at times the coarse admixture of his blood shows out, and he imitates his vulgar cousin in tying by the water’s edge, where the grazing kine may loiter, the weary peasant be trudging unobservant towards his home, his little son gathering drift-wood along the flood-line as he goes. ”

“ What an enormous power this insect wields, and how merciless it is in the exercise of it! Here the houses may not have gardens, there the builder must use no wood. In this place people have to do without carpets, and in that without a public park. Everything must be of metal, glass, or stone that rests on the ground even for a few hours, or when you return to it, it will be merely the shell of its former self. ”

“ There is something almost piteous in the way the plantain receives the rude wind. It throws up its long leaves in an agony, now drops them down again in despair, now flings them helplessly about. But it is not often that there is high wind with the rain. Generally there is only rain, — very much. ”

“ Overhead sat a vulture in the sulks, provoked at having been persuaded to come to catch ants [“Give me a good wholesome cat out of the river”] , and wondering that the kites could take the trouble to swallow such small morsels. But the vulture is alone in his opinion if he thinks that white ants are not an important feature of the rains. The fields may blush green, and jungles grow, in a week, but unless the white ants and their allies — hard-bodied and soft-bodied — come with the new leaves, the rains would hardly be the rains. ”

“ Spiders weighing an ounce, however harmless, are too big and too puffy to be treated with complete indifference. Then there is a pestilent animal resembling a black-beetle, with its head a good deal pulled off, having fishhooks at the ends of its legs, with which it grips you, and will not let go. Centipedes, enjoying a luxury of legs, (how strange that they are not proud!) think nothing, a mere trifle at most, of leaving all their toes sticking behind them when they run up your legs. ”

“ Outside, the heavens are falling in detail, but the sound comes to us only in its great expanse, more large than loud, heard only as a vast mutter. At our verandah’s edge is a poor spout noisily spurting its contents upon the gravel-path, and yet it is only to our own poor spout that we give heed. ”

“ They never got out again, and there they are to this day, old and childless; their croak is sullen and defiant, for they are down a deep well, and can’t get out. “It is enough to sour one’s temper,” acknowledges our frog; and he goes forth delicately, looking before he leaps. “Living in such a world, I seem to be a frog abiding in a dried-up well.” The Upanishad contains no happier illustration than this.
How the rain pours down! A wall, beneath which he has rested to croak awhile, cracks, gapes, and falls. By a miracle and a very long jump he escapes ”

“ When it rains there are, to those inside the house, two sounds, a greater and a less, and it is curious, and very characteristic of our humanity, that the less always seems the greater. The one is the great dead sound of falling water — the out-of-doors being rained upon — almost too large to hear. ”

“ It is impossible to appear unconscious of long-legged terrors that silently drop on your head, or shiny, nodular ones that rush at your face and neck with a buzz in the steamy evenings in the rains. A tarantula on the towel-horse, especially if it is standing on tiptoe, is too palpable, and no one can pretend not to see it there. ”

“ The wading heifer has hardly time to utter one terror-stricken groan ere she is below the crimson-bubbled water. Woe to the herdsman if he leads his kine across the ford. The water-fowl floating on the river, the patient ibis, the grave sarus-cranes, fare ill if they tempt the squalid brute. The ghurial [2] is of a finer breed. Living in the water he seeks his food in it, and does not flaunt his Maker with improvidence by wandering on the dry earth in search of sustenance. ”

“ There are no buggies passing now, from beneath whose hoods, as the vivid lightning leaps out of the black clouds, will leap sharp whip-lashes, curling themselves disagreeably round his thin loins, or tingling across his pink nose. ”

“ In their element they grow courageous, for the communist crow who has left his shelter to see “what on earth those ducks can have got,” and who has settled near them, is promptly charged, beak lowered, by the drake, who waggles his curly tail in pride as the evil fowl goes flapping away. ”

“ Cats, too, will amuse themselves with frogs; even the more chivalrous dog will not disdain to bite a frog when he comes suddenly upon one round a corner. In the evening, however, he takes his hops abroad, makes his meal of ants, and starts off to the nearest place of pleasure. ”

“ Ridiculous round beetles tumble on their backs and scramble and slide about the dinner-table till they get a purchase on the cruet-stand, up which they climb in a deliberate and solemn manner, and having reached the top, go forthwith headlong into the mustard. ”

“ Sometimes they get out again unperceived, but an irregular track of mustard on the cloth, with a drop wherever the beetle stopped to take breath, leads to the discovery of the wanderer sitting among the salad and pretending to be a caper. Then again there are oval beetles, which never tumble on their backs, but dart about so quickly that you are uncertain whether something did or did not go into the soup, until you find them at the bottom. Many other insects come to the festive board, unbidden guests ”

“ The particular grasshopper in point may have been a cripple, but, as a rule, the insect has a shrewd way of hopping that makes me think respectfully of his hind legs, and looking into the matter, I find I am borne out by Sir Thomas Browne, who says, “whereto [that is leaping] it is very well conformed, for therein the [grasshopper] the legs behind are longer than all the body, and make at the second joint acute angles at a considerable advancement above their bodies.” Do not the French call the grasshopper sauterelle? ”