lake not far off, twenty furlongs in circumference, with all kinds of fish in it, where we swim and sail in a little skiff that I made. It is now twenty-seven years since we were swallowed. Everything else is perhaps endurable, but our neighbours and fellow-countrymen are extremely quarrelsome and unpleasant, being unsociable and savage.” “What!” said I, “are there other people in the whale, too?” “Why, yes, lots of them,” said he; “they are unfriendly and are oddly built. In the western part of the forest, the tail part, live the Broilers, an eel-eyed, lobster-faced people that are warlike and bold, and are cannibals. On one side, by the starboard wall, live the Mergoats,[1] like men above and catfish below: they are not so wicked as the others. To port there are the Crabclaws and the Codheads, who are friends and allies with each other. The interior is inhabited by Clan Crawfish and the Solefeet, good fighters and swift runners. The eastern part, that near the mouth, is mostly uninhabited, as it is subject to inundations of the sea. I live in it, however, paying the Solefeet a tribute of five hundred oysters. a year. Such being the nature of the country, it is for you to see how we can fight with all these tribes and how we are to get a living.” “How many are there of them in all?” said I. “More than a thousand,” said he. “What sort of weapons have they?” “Nothing but fishbones,”
- ↑ According to Herodotus (2, 46), μένδης was Egyptian for goat; but there is nothing goatish in the Tritonomendetes as Lucian describes them.
