“Oh no; they swarm in this muddy river. I wonder they have let that come down.”
He pointed to something floating at a short distance from the ship, and I looked at it with curiosity.
“Some dead animal?” I said.
“A dead man, Vincent. We are going up the estuary of the sacred river, you know, and it is the burial-place of the great cities which are upon its bank.”
I turned away from the floating object with a shudder of horror, and was silent for some minutes, but broke out with—
“But the great turtles—will they drag a man or a horse under water, and eat him?”
“I have never seen it,” he replied; “but I have seen them attack a dood.”
“What is a dood?”
“A camel; one of a troop fording the river. It had plunged into a deep hole, and before it could struggle back into the shallow it was pulled under, and never rose again.”
“Ugh!” I shuddered; “how horrid!”