And, since the taboo was essentially religious, to Agno was deputed the ecclesiastical task of guarding and cherishing and caring for the royal laying-yard.
But Agno was no longer young.

The acid bite of belly desire had long since deserted him, and he, too, ate from a sense of duty, all meat tasting alike to him.

Megapode eggs only stung his taste alive and stimulated the flow of his juices.

Thus it was that he broke the taboos he imposed, and, privily, before the eyes of no man, woman, or child ate the eggs he stole from Bashti's private preserve.
So it was, as the laying season began, and when both Bashti and Agno were acutely egg-yearning after six months of abstinence, that Agno led Jerry along the taboo path through the mangroves, where they stepped from root to root above the muck that ever steamed and stank in the stagnant air where the wind never penetrated.
The path, which was not an ordinary path and which consisted, for a man, in wide strides from root to root, and for a dog in four-legged leaps and plunges, was new to Jerry.

In all his ranging of Somo, because it was so unusual a path, he had never discovered it.