Chantemesle by Robin Fedden

Author:Robin Fedden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eland Publishing
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Seven

‘These,’ said the old man, leaning forward in the basket chair by the summerhouse, ‘are the names of the river’s seven mouths:

‘Pelusiac, Tenetic,

Mendesian, Phatnitic,

Sebennetic,

Canopic and Bolbotine.’

He intoned the words as if they were verse.

Embayed by the wood, the lawn was a green water; there was the same bird intermittently singing that I had heard as I peered through the bushes on that first expedition. But now I was seated at the garden table beside Clotilde and an exercise book lay open before me. The voice resumed. ‘When the Levantine fishermen whose sails are copied from the swallow’s wing (no other rig so catches the faintest breeze) take soundings off the Egyptian coast, they bring up on their lines not the gravels of the sea-bottom, but the black silt of Abyssinia, soil that the Nile has brought two thousand miles from the Queen of Sheba’s garden.’ Neither Monsieur Thibaut – ‘Thib’ as we called him – nor Clotilde and I regarded this as news of a purely geographical sort. Once again the incantation drifted off into the wood:

‘Pelusiac, Tenetic,

Mendesian, Phatnitic,

Sebennetic,

Canopic and Bolbotine.’

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