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"Get my knife, Evan And cut those reeds They are hollow and we can breathe through them"
I did, and they were, and we could and did We crouched with our heads below the surface and breathed through the reeds, and I considered just how far I had co through a h a hollow reed, and who could say what the future ht hold
Every once in a while I would co tihtened up and we looked at each other We et and filthy and covered with fly bites
"This pool," I said
"Filthy water"
"But it kept us fro eaten alive, which is probably ould have happened They did a pretty good job on us as it was How did you know to run for water?"
"It see to do"
"And how did you know that the water would be here? You ran straight toward it And how did you know the reeds would be hollow?"
She straightened up, beamed "I am African," she said
"So?"
"Certain knowledge is inborn, Evan" She tilted her head "This is s I am able to react intuitively You, a white man, would not understand"
I nodded at this Plued She started to say so, then led her carefully in the other direction to the bank She scrambled out and collapsed on the bank The crocodile she had al himself
"We are very fortunate," she said "He was just a few yards from us People are often eaten by crocodiles"
"If not by flies"
"I never considered that there ht be a crocodile in the water"
"Crocodiles There are quite a few of them, actually" I pointed some out "All sizes," I said
"I led us into the middle of a crocodile pool"
"Any port in a storm"
"A pool of crocodiles-" She tre to stop the trehtened, narrowed her eyes
"I a Welsh ladies know nothing of crocodiles"
The flies didn’t turn out to be tsetse flies Or, if they were, they were out of condition, because neither of us got sleeping sickness It had occurred toidly ould happen if we did Would e the foran? Either way, I thought, ould very probably die of it The poetic i sickness of a hard-core insoh, ave us were fly bites Which was enough The bites were red and itched I was afraid they et better, either Plu out This was one of her less successful Afro bits It didn’t work at all We went on itching until we ran into a hunting party froathered leaves from a shrub, boiled them, let the solution cool, and put it on our bites They stopped itching immediately and healed completely in a matter of hours It was dauess, two days after the treatment of the fly bites that Plum fell in the lion pit There was really no way to avoid it Whoever dug the thing concealed it perfectly, and Plurabs at her body, and she was giggling happily and darting on ahead, and abruptly the earth opened up under her feet and she disappeared I dashed forward and looked down, and the sight was reassuringly anticlimactic The pit had been furnished with sharpened stakes, but they were literally few and far between, and Plum had fallen between a batch of the anything, so she was all right But she wasn’t happy
I got her out and dusted her off and we pressed onward, a little less enthusiastically than before It see on with a little less enthusiashed I told her she see the sa to despiseapart And yours too, I think"
"Yes"
"I think it was a bad idea washing theood to determine first if the water is clean, and if it has an odor"
"Next ti We lay there together in silence Mosquitoes buzzed us and aved theap-toothed ht keepcarrion in the fire They weren’t supposed to like this, for which I could scarcely blame them The idea was that you carried around a little sack of spoiled flesh, and at night you kept throwing chunks of it into the fire The mosquitoes would have had to be a lot worse before we tried this
Plus of lechery and turned on paternalis "We should be at the mission soon," I said
"And then?"
"Well, they’ll feed us And it ought to be possible to get a bath and some fresh clothes"
"And the latest word on Sheena"
"That too"
She looked up at le, her spirits had gradually da with the terrain No doubt the flies had had so to do with it, and the lion pit, and the unfortunate stream where we had washed our clothes
She said, "Do you believe there is a Sheena?"