For a long time he heard no other noise than the cries of these birds and the drumming of the feet of the horse. As he went on, he caught another noise, which at first he thought must be the wind in the tree-tops. Then, as it grew louder, he recognised it as the noise of water. He came round a curve upon a scene so beautiful that it made him pull up.
He came unexpectedly upon a ravine or gash in the hill. Close to him, on his left side, the hill, which had always been steep, changed suddenly to crag, over which a brook was falling in white, delaying mists, for some seven hundred feet. At the foot of the fall some long distant collapse had made an undercliff, nearly flat, across which the water loitered in a broad shallow rock basin, till it reached another fall. What he had been hearing was the noise of the falls.
As the ravine and pool made a wide open space, all the hillside in front of him was in such light that he could see, for the first time, what colour can be. The timber grew to great heights beyond the pool, but all the timber down the glade was heaped and piled with a pouring fire of creeper in blossom. A white flowered creeper had piled itself like snow even to the tops of the green-hearts, and fell thence in streamers and banners.
All the crags, as well as the rocks of the pool, were of a pale blue colour, like lapis lazuli. Mists from the falling water made rainbows all down the cliff. White birds cruised among the rainbows and changed colour in them.
He saw all this in a few seconds of admiration. Then he saw that the broad shallow pool was peopled by a priesthood, in rosy mantles, moving with an exquisite peace along the water. The leading priest rose into the air silently and gracefully; the others followed, till all the flight were moving away, more like flowers or thoughts or dreams than birds. He watched them till their effortless wings drooped them to some lower pool out of sight. “Those are the rosy ibises,” he thought.
“Damned pretty birds,” his father had said, “only you don’t often get a shot at them.”
He rode through the pool to the rising trail beyond; soon he was in the gloom again, winding up into the hills among forest. “I must be near the big dry pan or valley,” he thought. “I hope I haven’t gone wrong.”
Almost as he uttered the thought the thickets thinned to an undergrowth in blossom noisy with bees. A few yards more brought him out to the “very big dry” of the savannah, which was unlike anything ever seen by him.
His first thought was that it was the crater of a volcano or the bed of a lake, perhaps twenty miles long by seven broad. It may well have been both, in turn. Now it was an expanse of grass ringed by hills. Some eagles were cruising over it; their majesty suited the vastness of the expanse. The emptiness and the freedom of the vastness made Hi catch his breath. He was the king of that space; there was nothing there but wind and grass, with clumps of tussock-grass standing out here and there.
He did not take it all in at once; then he thought, “I was to meet peones here, who will set me on my way. I see no peones.”