BUFFALOES 409 



or in small parties. Their home was in a great belt of 

 papyrus swamp, fifteen miles long, or thereabout, and a 

 mile broad in places. This papyrus belt was a regular 

 morass of slime and water. The thick-growing papyrus 

 stems, with their plumed heads, were twenty or thirty feet 

 tall. The gloomy depths of the morass served as a secure 

 refuge for the buffaloes, and they had trodden innumerable 

 trails hither and thither through it. These trails were mere 

 lanes of deep mire and water, with the huge stems of papy- 

 rus crisscrossing over them; only the vast strength of the 

 beasts, their short, thick legs and brawny bodies, enabled 

 them to plough their way along them, or at need to shoulder 

 a passage through the reeds. If buffaloes were not half- 

 amphibious beasts they could not dwell amid such surround- 

 ings. While the herd was among these huge reed beds it 

 was practically safe from pursuit; that is, a keen hunter 

 would have gone in after them as a matter of course if it 

 had been impossible to get them otherwise, but the odds 

 would have been much against the man's success, and the 

 danger would have been serious; besides there was no diffi- 

 culty in getting them outside the reeds. Their station 

 when in the reed beds was usually marked by the attendant 

 cow-herons. These small white herons accompany the ele- 

 phant, rhino, and buffalo in flocks, frequently alighting on 

 their backs. They catch the grasshoppers and other insects 

 kicked up from the grass by the feet of their hosts. In Heat- 

 ley's papyrus swamp the cow-herons evidently found the 

 dark cover uncongenial. The flock, which accompanied the 

 herd in the open as familiarly as cow-buntings accompany 

 cattle in our own pastures, usually perched in a body among 

 the papyrus tops when the herd was resting near by among 



