The gully quickly filled. It often did when rain was heavy. Usually it rose to a gap near the bottom and was channeled out and over the adjacent ground before the bottom was covered. This time the rain came down so hard and so fast that the level rose more swiftly than it ever had, and the gap wasn’t wide enough for the water to drain out before it covered the gully from end to end. The rain kept on falling and the level kept on rising and the water reached the cleft and flowed in and down. It poured into the underground chamber like water down a funnel. It drenched the enormous mass of serpents and the mass writhed to life, annoyed. Like strands of unraveling thread, the multitude uncoiled and unwound and swarmed up the cleft. Not by scores or by hundreds but by the thousands. So many filled the cleft that they temporarily stopped the water. In a living torrent of their own they flowed out of the cleft and up and out of the gully onto the ground above. They didn’t stop there. The battering rain, the wet and the cold, were not to their liking.
