“But what do I care for him, with his Karen cloths or hammered brass?” I chattered at her. “Come to me, Sweet One of a Thousand Delights.”
So the days and the evenings and nights went by, and the greater rains followed the lesser. The river crept up and up and up, roaring now to the cliffs, like old lions.
Then came a day when on going home at eve I stooped at the river’s brim near the house we had on the rock spit, and felt of the water. It was chilled. “The flood is full,” I thought. I had felt the snow-chill from the Tibetan Himalayas in hoary Salwin’s yellow flood. When that comes, the utmost sources of the world have been tapped for flood water.
“The river will begin to fall to-morrow,” I told Nagy N’Yang when I came into the place. “We will go soon after, when the big trading is over.”
She smiled at me. Then she patted with her soft hand the place where she had tattooed on my brow the mark of the third eye of Siva. It was healed.
“I care not where we go, or if we go or stay, so long as you are with me,” she whispered, close against my side.
After the evening meal we sat in the doorway and heard the river talking. Often the big whirlpool sighed or moaned.
“It will almost cover our rock spit,” I said. I knew by the lift of it by day and the noise of it by night that the flood was a mighty one and would spend its chief force that night.
She nodded and nestled closer to me.