Title:  The Waters of Edera

Author:  Louise de la Ramée, a.k.a.  Ouida

Release Date:  September 15, 2004 [EBook #13459]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

*** Start of this project gutenberg EBOOK the waters of Edera ***

This eBook was prepared by Carol Poster.

THE WATERS OF EDERA

BY O U I D A

Author of
“Moths,” “Under Two Flags,” “The Silver Christ,” Etc.

London
T. Fisher UNWIN
Paternoster Square

1900

THE WATERS OF EDERA

I

It was a country of wide pastures, of moors covered with heath, of rock-born streams and rivulets, of forest and hill and dale, sparsely inhabited, with the sea to the eastward of it, unseen, and the mountains everywhere visible always, and endlessly changing in aspect.

Herdsmen and shepherds wandered over it, and along its almost disused roads pedlars and pack mules passed at times but rarely.  Minerals and marbles were under its turf, but none sought for them; pools and lakes slept in it, undisturbed save by millions of water fowl and their pursuers.  The ruins of temples and palaces were overgrown by its wild berries and wild flowers.  The buffalo browsed where emperors had feasted, and the bittern winged its slow flight over the fields of forgotten battles.

It was the season when the flocks are brought through this lonely land, coming from the plains to the hills.  Many of them passed on their way thus along the course of the Edera water.  The shepherds, clothed in goatskin, with the hair worn outward, bearded, brown, hirsute men, looking like savage satyrs, the flocks they drove before them travel-worn, lame, heart-broken, the lambs and kids bleating painfully.  They cannot keep up with the pace of the flock, and, when they fall behind, the shepherds slit their throats, roast their bodies over an evening fire, or bake them under its ashes, and eat them; if a town or village be near, the little corpses are sold in it.  Often a sheep dog or a puppy drops down in the same way, footsore and worn out; then the shepherds do not tarry, but leave the creatures to their fate, to die slowly of thirst and hunger.

The good shepherd is a false phrase.  No one is more brutal than a shepherd.  If he were not so he could not bear his life for a day.

All that he does is brutal.  He stones the flock where it would tarry against his will.  He mutilates the males, and drags the females away from their sucking babes.  He shears their fleeces every spring, unheeding how the raw skin drops blood.  He drives the halting, footsore, crippled animals on by force over flint and slate and parching dust.  Sometimes he makes them travel twenty miles a day.