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The water rises when human blood enters it · and gives back what it takes. In both, a serpentine water-power is roused specifically by the pollution of its waters with blood and the dead; it surges over its banks, engulfs the transgressors' bodies, and then returns them (Scamander casts the corpses out onto land and hides the living unharmed; Yurlunggur vomits the swallowed sisters back whole). The flood is examination and expulsion, not appetite: neither keeps a single body.
The elder sister's blood runs into the waterhole where Yurlunggur, the rainbow serpent, lies; the serpent rises with a flood, swallows the sisters and their children · and afterward regurgitates them, the swallowing-and-return becoming the charter of ceremony.
set against Iliad XXI
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