TANGANYIKA (1) 137 
chew them up. In this delightful setting overlooking the Sigi 
River, Ferrand and I took up residence with a cook, houseboy 
and gramophone. A later acquisition was a ramshackle 30 h.p. 
box-body car which, when it was in the right mood, enabled us to 
go farther afield to hunt rare specimens. 
On some nights, particularly before a storm, the moths came 
in in such numbers that we had to eat our soup as far as possible 
from the light of our hurricane lamps. As soon as any bats 
entered, the moths seemed to know instinctively that they had 
little chance of survival while on the wing, and straight away 
settled on the walls. It was interesting to watch the frustrated bats 
careering round the room and flicking at the moths with their 
wing-tips to try and make them take off, but they were not often 
successful. The wall-geckos benefited by these maneuvers, as the 
moths that stuck tight were easily caught by them, and any that 
escaped a gecko had to settle again immediately or it was snapped 
up by a bat. In the darkness the moths seemed to have more 
difficulty in detecting bats, for every morning we awoke to find 
moth wings all over the tops of our mosquito nets. Sometimes 
when I was awake I could hear the soft swish. of a bat’s wings, 
and later the sound of crunching as the creatures hung upside- 
down on a beam above my head chewing the body of a moth and 
allowing the wings to float downwards. 
Like me, Ferrand delighted in the antics of the bats and geckos 
as we sipped our “sundowners,” but he took on an entirely dif- 
ferent air whenever J emerged triumphantly from the room with 
the cracked floor dangling a snake from the end of my snake- 
stick. A surprising number of these reptiles appeared in the house 
from time to time, usually when they were least expected, and it 
fell to my lot to shut the doors while the staff graciously disap- 
peared, and chase the snake from behind all kinds of impedi- 
menta until I could slip a noose somewhere round its neck or 
body. 
We were often forcefully reminded that our abode was part of 
the jungle itself. Through many years of sleeping in strange places 
with the welfare of my menagerie always uppermost in my 
thoughts, I had learned to sleep so lightly that the faintest sound 
brought me instantly to full consciousness. One dark night I was 
