“Very well,” I said; “come and tell me all about it, and what a baby Rainbow is doing down here.”
We all moved to a place of safety, and they explained that what we call hailstones are really Rainbow’s eggs, and that they fall on the ground and hatch into worms— I mean baby Rainbows! The wise men of the tribe say it is so, and of course they know everything. This is how they found out:—many years ago a great number of hailstones fell, which is a very unusual thing on the Roper River; every one was afraid to touch them, for they didn’t know what they were; so they sat and looked at them in wonder until they had all burrowed into the ground—“melted,” the whites call it! Now this looked very strange, and after a great deal of talking, one very brave old blackfellow dug a hole to see what was happening underneath. Instead of hailstones, he found brightly-coloured little creatures—worms, of course—creeping about in the wet earth. Every one looked at them and said they were very like little Rainbows, and that they must have hatched out of the hailstones, which could be nothing else but Rainbow’s eggs. Of course everybody knew, before, that the grown-up Rainbow is a Debbil-debbil snake who lives in the Roper River, and that he kindly takes care of the fish supply for the blackfellows. He is very good, and allows you to catch as many fish as you can eat, but he can’t bear to see any wasted. He gets dreadfully angry if he knows that any one has been spearing fish for fun, and leaving them to rot on the banks. I don’t wonder at his anger, for if everybody did that, soon there would be no fish left.
He and his wife often go for a stroll together in the sky. He is red and yellow in colour, and she is blue. It is while they are strolling about that they catch the guilty people. They pick them up before they can say “Jack Robinson,” and carry them off to the Roper River—and feed the fish upon their bodies.
When I heard that the worm was really a baby Rainbow, I felt very thankful that I had not hurt it, for it would be awful to be chased by an angry Mother Debbil-debbil Rainbow!
After such a narrow escape we thought that under the palm trees was not a very safe place, so we went and finished the washing and spread everything out to dry, and then began the fun of chasing the grasshoppers, lest they should settle on the clothes and eat holes in them. As the lubras darted about, here and there, the scene looked more like a Sunday-school picnic than a washing-day. It certainly sounded like one.
Blacks are blacks, and whites are whites, and as I looked from the merry black faces to the clean white clothes, I knew their way of working was best—for them, at any rate, so I kept on being a “bad mistress” and a “goodfellow Missus,” and we all enjoyed washing day —all except Sue! The fun was too wet for her, and besides it always made her think of worms—Rainbows, I mean!
My friends used to wonder why I was not lonely, a hundred miles from any white neighbours, and I used to wonder if any one could be lonely with a perpetual circus and variety show on the premises.
