TANGANYIKA (Ir) 237 
scratch crew composed of the baker, barman, waiters and others 
was being let down in a lifeboat, when something went wrong 
with the pulley, causing the boat to drop at one end so that it hung 
vertically by a single rope. By some miracle all the crew managed 
to cling on while the boat was righted—an operation which took 
fully ten minutes. When all was well and the liner had brought 
itself to a standstill, the lifeboat took off in an unconvincing style, 
but they had gone less than thirty yards when the crew found 
the German apparently none the worse for wear. Evidently the 
shock of the cold water had brought him to his senses and made 
him change his outlook. 
When the man was brought to the gangway, which had been let 
down in readiness, he was met by the ship’s hefty butcher, who 
rough-handled him as if he were a side of beef. With a mighty 
heave he threw him on his back and carried him up the gangway 
and then dumped him on the deck. With aid he was able to walk 
back to the hospital, but it was noticeable through all this that 
the ship’s doctor kept well out of sight. Most of the passengers 
were British and were quite stirred by this dramatic episode, not 
least by the launching of the lifeboat, which would have been 
serious under different circumstances. Other episodes during the 
course of the voyage made us quite relieved when we reached 
Dar-es-Salaam and could leave the boat for good. 
Our destination was Saranda, a stop on the central railway a 
few stations west of Dodoma and over three hundred miles from 
the coast. We had heard of a farmhouse that was vacant and had 
obtained permission to stay there. 
Saranda itself was composed of only a few corrugated-iron shacks 
centered in rather flat, dry thorn-scrub country. Without delay 
we were able to arrange with an Indian to transport us by lorry to 
the farmhouse, which was in rather an outlandish spot some 
fifteen miles south of the railway. 
After the usual preliminaries of finding a cook and a houseboy, 
we made ourselves fairly comfortable, then got down to the busi- 
ness of exploring the countryside and becoming familiar with the 
local bird-life. This was interesting, for I saw a number of birds 
such as Chestnut Sparrows, Silverbills, Social Weavers and Black- 
