But as they were about to sit down, Pan, who had woke up when he scented rabbits, suddenly disappeared in a hollow. “What’s that,” said Mark. He went to see, and heard a sound of lapping. “Water!” shouted Mark, and Bevis came to him. Deep down in a narrow channel there was the merest trickle of shallow water, but running, and clear as crystal. It came from chalk, and it was limpid. Pan could drink, but they could not. His hollow tongue lapped it up like a spoon; but it was too shallow to scoop up in the palm of the hand, and they had no tube of “gix,” or reed, or oat straw, or buttercup stalk to suck through. They sprang into the channel itself, alighting on a place the water did not cover, but with the stream under their feet they could not drink. Nothing but a sparrow could have done so. Presently Bevis stooped, and with his hands scratched away the silt which formed the bottom, a fine silt of powdered chalk, almost like quicksand, till he had made a bowl-like cavity. The stream soon filled it, but then the water was thick, being disturbed, and they had to wait till it had settled. Then they lapped too, very carefully, with the hollow palm, taking care that the water which ran through their fingers should fall below, and not above the bowl, or the weight of the drops would disturb it again. With perseverance they satisfied their thirst; then they returned to the oak, and took out their provisions; they could eat now. “This is a jolly jungle,” said Mark, with his mouth full. “That’s a banyan,” said Bevis, pointing with the knuckle-end of the drum-stick he was gnawing at the oak over them. “It’s about eleven thousand years old.” Then Mark took the drum-stick, and had his turn at it. When it was polished, Pan had it: he cracked it across with his teeth, just as the hyenas did in the cave days, for the animals never learnt to split bones, as the earliest men did. Pan cracked it very disconsolately: his heart was with the fleshpots. Boom! They starred. It was the same peculiar sound they had heard before, and seemed to come from an immense distance. A pheasant crowed as he heard it in the jungle close by them, and a second farther away. “What can it be?” whispered Mark. “Is there anything here?”--glancing around. “There may be some genii,” said Bevis quietly. “Very likely there are some genii: they are everywhere. But I do not know what that was. Listen!”