Note 904 — Chapter XXXI · FISHING METHODS

We sometimes find with an army crossing a river, as delineated in the sculptures, each soldier with the skin beneath his belly and paddling with his legs and arms, but retaining in his mouth one of the legs of the skin, into which he blows as into a bagpipe. The act of paddling across a big river, like the Euphrates, would of itself need all his breath; but King points out that the sculptor, in the spirit of primitive art, which, diffident of its own powers of portrayal or distrusting the imagination of the beholder, seeks to make its object clear by conventional devices, wishes to indicate that the skins are not solid bodies, and can find no better way of showing it than by making his swimmers continue blowing out the skins.