The boat cut into a dense mass of papyrus plants. Their umbrella-like tops quivered as though alive, the stems rustled and bent over the boat like two high green walls. The yellow ambaki flowers smelt of bitter almond and warm water and the pink lotoses, nekhebs, of sweet aniseed. Blue dragonflies whirred unceasingly over the floating leaves. An ichneumon, a sharp-faced little creature with whiskers, something between a cat and a rat, was stealing up the entangled papyrus-stems, and the bird-mother fluttering over her nest desperately flapped her wings to drive the robber away. Suddenly in the far distance there was a loud trumpet-call: it was a hippopotamus, roaring as it spouted water from its nostrils like a whale.
Water birds flew about in clouds: sacred herons—benu—with two long feathers thrown back over their heads, sacred ibises, bald-headed and white but for a black tail and a black edge on the wings; wild ducks, geese, swans, cranes, spoonbills, plovers, water-hens, hoopoos, peewits, divers, pelicans, cormorants, golden-eyes, lapwings, magpies, snipe, fish-hawks and many others. They were singing, twittering, chirruping, calling, quacking, screeching, whistling, cackling, cawing, droning, clucking.
"Vepvet!" Merira called, and a huge yellow hunting cat, with emerald eyes, that had been sleeping at the bottom of the boat, jumped to him and settled beside him on the bow, pricking up its ears.
He threw a flat, curved tablet made of rhinoceros skin—a weapon of immemorial antiquity. It flew along, struck its aim and describing an arc in the air returned to him and fell at his feet. The cat jumped into the thicket and brought a bird that had been killed. He threw the weapon again, and the cat brought another bird, and soon the boat was so full of game that it began to sink.
They rowed to a little island surrounded on all sides with thick walls of papyrus, three times the height of man, bright green and fresh as in paradise. In days of old, Mother Isis brought up the baby Horus in such a papyrus nest.
They landed. A fisherman's net was stretched out on poles on the shore to dry. There was a bed of reeds under a shelter of dry palm leaves. Dio sat on the bed and Merira on the ground at her feet. The cat ate fish greedily.
"She is as good at scenting prey as Ruru was," Merira said.
"Why 'was'?" Dio asked in surprise.
"Don't you know? The poor creature was killed the other day. Tuta wept over it as though it had been his own daughter and has fallen ill with grief."
"Who killed it?"