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Emerging from the swamp of mangroves, abruptly they came upon a
patch of sand, still so salt and inhospitable from the sea's deposit
that no great trees rooted and interposed their branches between it
and the sun's heat. A primitive gate gave entrance, but Agno did
not take Jerry through it. Instead, with weird little chirrupings
of encouragement and excitation, he persuaded Jerry to dig a tunnel
beneath the rude palisade of fence. He helped with his own hands,
dragging out the sand in quantities, but imposing on Jerry the
leaving of the indubitable marks of a dog's paws and claws.
And, when Jerry was inside, Agno, passing through the gate, enticed
and seduced him into digging out the eggs. But Jerry had no taste
of the eggs. Eight of them Agno sucked raw, and two of them he
tucked whole into his arm-pits to take back to his house of the
devil devils. The shells of the eight he sucked he broke to
fragments as a dog might break them, and, to build the picture he
had long visioned, of the eighth egg he reserved a tiny portion
which he spread, not on Jerry's jowls where his tongue could have
erased it, but high up about his eyes and above them, where it would
remain and stand witness against him according to the plot he had
planned.
Even worse, in high priestly sacrilege, he encouraged Jerry to
attack a megapode hen in the act of laying. And, while Jerry slew
it, knowing that the lust of killing, once started, would lead him
to continue killing the silly birds, Agno left the laying-yard to
hot-foot it through the mangrove swamp and present to Bashti an
ecclesiastical quandary. The taboo of the dog, as he expounded it,
had prevented him from interfering with the taboo dog when it ate
the taboo egg-layers. Which taboo might be the greater was beyond
him. And Bashti, who had not tasted a megapode egg in half a year,
and who was keen for the one recrudescent thrill of remote youth
still left to him, led the way back across the mangrove swamp at so
prodigious a pace as quite to wind his high priest who was many
years younger than he.
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