He made up the six bottles of gout mixture and presented them to Mudface with instructions in how it should be taken. He told him that although he was closing up the post office for regular service it would always be possible to get word to Puddleby. He would ask several birds of passage to stop here occasionally; and if the gout got any worse he wanted Mudface to let him know by letter.
The old turtle thanked him over and over again and the parting was a very affecting one. When at last the goodbyes were all said, they got into the canoe and set out on the return journey.
Reaching the mouth of the river at the southern end of the lake they paused a moment before entering the mangrove swamps and looked back. And there in the distance they could just see the shape of the old turtle standing on his new island, watching them. They waved to him and pushed on.
"He looks just the same as we saw him the night we arrived," said Dab-Dab—"you remember? Like a statue on a pedestal against the sky."
"Poor old fellow!" murmured the Doctor. "I do hope he will be all right now.... What a Wonderful life!—What a wonderful history!"
"Didn't I tell you, Doctor," said Cheapside, "that it was going to be the longest story in the world?—Took a day and half a night to tell."
"Ah, but it's a story that nobody else could tell," said John Dolittle.
"Good thing too," muttered the Sparrow. "It would never do if there was many of 'is kind spread around this busy world.—Of course, meself, I don't believe a word of the yarn. I think he made it all up. 'E 'ad nothin' else to do—sittin' there in the mud, century after century, cogitatin'."
The journey down through the jungle was completed without anything special happening. But when they reached the sea and turned the bow of the canoe westward they came upon a very remarkable thing. It was an enormous hole in the beach—or rather a place where the beach had been taken away bodily. Speedy told the Doctor that it was here that the birds had picked up the stones and sand on their way to Junganyika. They had literally carried acres of the seashore nearly a thousand miles inland. Of course in a few months the action of the surf filled in the hole, so that the place looked like the rest of the beach.
But that is why, when many years later some learned geologists visited Lake Junganyika, they said that the seashore gravel on an island there was a clear proof that the sea had once flowed through that neighborhood. Which was true—in the days of the Flood. But the Doctor was the only scientist who knew that Mudface's island, and the stones that made it, had quite a different history.