158 POETRY EMBODIED IN WORDS. 



his setting, often in a cloudless sky, and so continually looks 

 down upon the world like the eye of every day. From, the 

 absence up to a recent period of any clock or watch many 

 native expressions for time are very vague, and it strikes a 

 foreigner as very strange to hear a Malagasy say, even in the 

 forenoon, if one is late, that " evening is the day " (harlva 

 ny dndro), and even " night is the day " (dlina ny dndro), 

 a figure of speech common in many eastern countries. 



Then, a river is rinirdno, " mother of waters," while a 

 capital is rinivoliitra, " mother of towns." When the people 

 in the nearly treeless highlands of the interior speak of the 

 inhabitants of the more wooded coast plains, they call them 

 'ny ambdni-rdvina, i.e., " the (people) under the leaves." And 

 when the whole people are spoken of they are termed ny 

 ambdni-ldnitra, " the (people) under the heaven ; " but when 

 the royal family are excepted, they are termed ny ambdni- 

 dndro, "the (people) under the day." In another figurative 

 expression the people at large are termed bozaJc-dman-d/iitra, 

 "hay and grass," although it is not quite clear whether the 

 comparison refers to their numbers, or to the light estimation 

 in which " the masses " were held by former sovereigns. 



A less ambiguous and very poetical term is the word for 

 glory or honour ; this is vonindhitra, that is, " the flower of 

 the grass." Many of the grasses in Madagascar are very 

 fine, and it seems possible that their beauty suggested the 

 idea, and perhaps also their transitory character, honour 

 being so dependent in a despotic state of society upon the 

 caprice of the sovereign. In some passages of Scripture, 

 such, for instance, as i Pet. i. 24, where all the glory of man 

 is compared to the flower of the grass, the exact similarity 

 (in the Malagasy version) of the things compared has a 

 curious effect on the ear. 



Prom the aspect of the interior country during the dry 

 rainless months, when " the beauty of the grass is as a fading 

 flower," it being brown and parched, and all the rice-fields 

 are bare, comes another descriptive word, the season being 

 called ririnana, that is, the time of being swept off or cleared 

 away. 



I have often thought, as I have gazed with intense delight 



