278 THE FAUNA OF BRITISH EAST AFRICA part iii 



of the bank until the chief was out of sight ; but the danger 

 seemed so fanciful, that I thought my old friend merely wished 

 to speak to me, and could think of nothing else to say. Later 

 on, however, I found that the natives of other Pokomo villages 

 attribute the same power to the crocodile, and the German 

 missionaries at Ngao knew of cases where people had been thus 

 swept into the river and killed. The natives on the Nile told 

 Sir Samuel Baker the same story, and it is hardly likely 

 that it would have been independently invented in two such 

 distant localities, and by such different tribes, if it had no basis 

 in fact. 



Reports as to the size of crocodiles vary greatly. Lieut. 

 Giraud ^ shows a figure of one, which, on the most moderate 

 computation, must have been 4 feet high and 30 feet long, 

 while Werner ^ states that he saw specimens on the Congo 

 50 feet in length. I saw no such fine creatures as these. 

 The normal length of the adults on the Tana was from 10 

 to 1 2 feet, but a few were perhaps 3 feet longer. In the 

 rivers of the Rift Valley they were even smaller, and 

 certainly less dangerous. When we had to cross a river, 

 if there were crocodile tracks on the bank, we fired a few 

 shots into the water, shouted, and splashed about, and then 

 plunged in freely. Further precautions were only once or twice 

 taken, where the river was swift, muddy, and deep, and the 

 signs of the crocodile exceptionally abundant. 



In the shallow jungle-filled swamps of Baringo, crocodiles, 

 varying from 3 to 6 feet in length, are so numerous as to 

 remind me of Bates's statement that the caymans in some 

 of the upper tributaries of the Amazon are as abundant as 

 tadpoles in an English ditch. These small Baringo crocodiles 

 live on water-fowl, and seem afraid of anything larger. We 

 soon learned their harmlessness and timidity, and went into the 

 swamps and pulled out the ducks we had shot without hesita- 

 tion. Yet even in this district the natives have an ingrained 

 terror of crocodiles ; our local guide would never go into 

 the water if he could hel^ it, and then only after taking 

 elaborate precautions. Hence it is probable that the deeper 

 pools of the rivers of the Baringo basin are haunted by 



^ V. Giraud, Les Lacs de I' Afrique ^quatoriale (1890), p. 441. 

 - J. R. Werner, River Life on the Congo (1889), pp. 184-185. 



