CHAP, viii MOSQUITOES AND FLIES 127 



declared that the guide said there was no water or camping- 

 ground ahead for at least eight hours. This was manifestly 

 untrue ; so with the few words of Kikauvi that I had picked up, 

 I questioned Lomweri, but could only make out that we must 

 stop there for the night, as Kizizi was coming to see us in the 

 evening ; and I could see that the guide had been so bullied 

 by the porters that he would say anything. I felt a certain 

 amount of sympathy for the men, as they had had a very rough 

 time of it lately, and had doubtless been looking forward to a 

 long rest at Njemps. There was therefore some excuse for 

 their bad temper, and I did not like to be hard on them, so I 

 consented to pitch camp at once. Kizizi came in the evening, 

 and I also had a visit from a native of the town, who had been 

 with Teleki to Reschiat and back to Mombasa. He told me 

 that the name of the great salt lake to the south of Njemps is 

 Pirias, but I could get no recognition of this name from any 

 other native of the district and so distrust it. He was an 

 intelligent man, and spoke Kisuahili very fairly, but with a 

 curious, and even comic, guttural accent. He possessed also 

 three other accomplishments as a result of his contact with 

 civilisation — the ability to put on clothes, to smoke, and to swear. 

 The last he had acquired very thoroughly. 



We had been annoyed all day by swarms of flies. They 

 blackened the roof of my tent, and turned my basin of pea-soup 

 into a dipterous decoction. The flies, however, were harmless 

 in comparison with the mosquitoes, which rose like a mist from 

 the marshes immediately after sunset. Mosquito curtains were 

 far away with civilisation, and so I could only wrap myself in 

 my blanket-bag. Its texture was sufficiently impenetrable to 

 allow me complacently to pity the porters, whose thin cotton 

 sheeting was easily pierced. But mosquitoes are bed-fellows 

 that facilitate early rising ; the men were eager to be off in 

 the morning, and asserted that they had never experienced such 

 a night before. We reached the south shore of Lake Baringo 

 fairly early, and as I was anxious to communicate with the 

 natives, we camped opposite the island of Lukrum and fired a 

 couple of signal-shots. Meanwhile I started off to explore the 

 course of a river called the Ndow, which enters the swamps at the 

 mouth of the Tigirish. I was at first much puzzled in trying 

 to reconcile the maps of von Hohnel and Thomson of this part 



