At midnight of this same day only three things existed in the
world--on my table I turned from the _Bhagavad-Gita_ to Drinkwater's
_Reverie_ and back again; then I looked up to the jar of clear water
and watched Guinevere hovering motionless. At six the next morning she
was crouched safely on a bit of paper a foot from the aquarium. She
had missed the open window, the four-foot drop to the floor, and a
neighboring aquarium stocked with voracious fish: surely the gods of
pollywogs were kind to me. The great fins were gone--dissolved into
blobs of dull pink; the tail was a mere stub, the feet drawn close,
and a glance at her head showed that Guinevere had become a frog
almost within an hour. Three things I hastened to observe: the pupils
of her eyes were vertical, revealing her genus _Phyllomedusa_ (making
apt our choice of the feminine); by a gentle urging I saw that the
first and second toes were equal in length; and a glance at her little
humped back showed a scattering of white calcareous spots, giving the
clue to her specific personality--_bicolor_: thus were we introduced
to _Phyllomedusa bicolor_, alias Guinevere, and thus was established
beyond doubt her close relationship to Gawain.
During that first day, within three hours, during most of which I
watched her closely, Guinevere's change in color was beyond belief.
For an hour she leaped from time to time; but after that, and for the
rest of her life, she crept in strange unfroglike fashion, raised high
on all four limbs, with her stubby tail curled upward, and reaching
out one weird limb after another. If one's hand approached within a
foot, she saw it and stretched forth appealing, skinny fingers.
At two o'clock she was clad in a general cinnamon buff; then a shade
of glaucous green began to creep over head and upper eyelids, onward
over her face, finally coloring body and limbs. Beneath, the little
pollyfrog fairly glowed with bright apricot orange, throat and tail
amparo purple, mouth green, and sides rich pale blue. To this maze of
color we must add a strange, new expression, born of the prominent
eyes, together with the line of the mouth extending straight back with
a final jeering, upward lift; in front, the lower lip thick and
protruding, which, with the slanting eyes, gave a leering, devilish
smirk, while her set, stiff, exact posture compelled a vivid thought
of the sphinx. Never have I seen such a remarkable combination. It
fascinated us. We looked at Guinevere, and then at the tadpoles
swimming quietly in their tank, and evolution in its wildest
conceptions appeared a tame truism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account