The Sky And The Forest Read Online Free

cut the soil from their roots and they fell into the water. One could never look at the river for long without seeing some great tree come floating down on the turbulent current, turning and rolling in torment, lifting its arms in mute appeal to the pitiless sky as it rolled.
    In the distance the river looked blue and silver, but when one looked down into it from the bank it was muddy and brown, although the time of the real “brown water,” when the level rose a foot or two and the river took on a more definite colour, was still a month or two off. The surface of the river was never still; a storm would work it up into great rollers, and on a calm day like this, when at first sight the surface seemed almost oily, closer observation would reveal great swirls and motiveless crinklings, sinister, ugly movements as the broad water went sliding along, coming from nowhere, going nowhere, hateful and fearsome in its majesty. Loa watched Lanu pick up a fragment of rock and hurl it into the river with delight in the splash and the ring. Behaviour like that made Loa a trifle uncomfortable, for it savoured of unconventionality, but it was not quite bad enough for Loa to check Lanu -- nothing ever was.
    Indeharu was waiting for the ceremony to begin. Loa stood forward.
    “Sister,” he said, looking down the river to the distant reach whither his erring sister had strayed. “Come back from under the water. Come back into the sky. The -- the -- “
    “The nights are dark,” prompted Indeharu, as he always had to do.
    “The nights are dark, and your sons and daughters cannot fill the sky. Come back. Grow bigger, for the nights are very dark. Come back, my sister.”
    Somewhere under the surface of the river his sister was hiding; everyone knew of the liking she had for the big yellow river. A few people who had been caught by darkness away from the town and who had been forced to spend the night beside the river had told him of how she stretched her arms out over the water and how her spirit danced on its surface. Every month she wandered back to it and hid herself in its depths, and had to be recalled by her brother.
    A cloud of butterflies was flying along the river in a vast bank, reaching from the surface nearly up to the level of Loa's face, more than a hundred feet; stretching nearly half a mile across the river and a quarter of a mile down it. With the wind behind them they passed rapidly downstream, a lavender-tinted cloudbank. Flaws of wind recoiling from the bank whirled parts of it into little eddies, and the sun shining down caught the millions of wings and was reflected back in a constant succession of rosy highlights. Lanu clapped his hands at the sight of them.
    “What are they?” he asked, excitedly.
    “They come from the sky,'‘ answered Loa, heavily.
    No doubt they were beautiful, but Loa was too disturbed mentally by the vast distances to experience more than mixed emotions regarding them. His brother the sky was looking down at him from all directions, and he did not like that; it was like having an enemy at his back. Across the river the forest was dwindled to a mere strip of blue in the steamy atmosphere. It was frightening to see the forest so insignificant, the sky so big. It gave Loa no doubts regarding his own status as a god -- the first among equals, among sky and forest and river and sun -- but it disturbed him violently by its disruption of the usual state of affairs. It was not respectable, it was not usual, it chafed him and irritated him.
    “Look! Look!” said Lanu, pointing.
    Far up the river there was a dark speck to be seen. It moved upon the surface, and as it moved reflected sunshine winked from it. A boat, with the sunshine gleaming on the wet paddles. That was a phenomenon to be regarded with a dull lack of interest. There were other men in the world, Loa knew, besides the people of the town and the little men. Some of them went about on the river in canoes. In the days of Nasa, Loa's