82 THE CENTRAL PROVINCE 



There are several characteristic creatures which haunt these acres of 

 water vegetation, both on the indented shores of the Victoria Nyanza (in 

 its northern portion) and in the not dissimilar marshes along the Victoria. 

 Nile and in the interior of Uganda. There is that strange bird with the 

 monstrous head — Balceniceps rex, a grotesque development of a primitive 

 type half-way between stork and heron. This creature, with blue-grey- 

 ash-colour plumage, and an enormous shoe-shaped beak of mottled red 

 and yellow, with its ridiculous little twisted crest at the apex of the 

 monstrous head, and its huge eye of pale yellow, its upright carriage 

 and solemn demeanour, is one of Nature's efforts at humorous expression. 



The dapper little lily-trotter (Parra), which is a peculiar development 

 of the plover type with a body shaped like that of a moorhen (chocolate- 

 brown, greenish-black, and cream-colour), tlie legs of a coot, and toes- 

 which have developed enormously lengthened claws (so that the bird is 

 able to spread these spider-like feet over the surface of the water vegetation, 

 amongst which it hunts for the insects on the thick leaves); the water 

 antelope, with its twisted horns and shaggy hair of reddish grey ; the 

 otter, of golden-brown with a white belly ; the crocodile, lying in ambush 

 either for human being, antelope, or fish ; and, amongst many odd fishes,, 

 that extraordinary lung-fish locally known as the " mamba," a type which 

 has descended almost imclianged from the Carboniferous Epoch to the 

 present day, are examples of characteristic forms found in the Nyanza. 

 marslies. 



The papyrus rears its apple-green jungles on all the sheltered swampy 

 shores of the lake. What can exceed in its own kind the beauty of this 

 rush — the long, smooth green stem, not completely round, but in section 

 like a U, with one flat side ; the mop-head of exquisite, silky, uncountable 

 filaments, which bifurcate into even finer threads near their termination,, 

 of the })urest green, and glistening w^ith a bluish gloss? When the 

 rush-head flowers there are little flat cones of pale gold inflorescence 

 fixed in pairs among the uncountable barren filaments. This inflorescence 

 forms a nimbus of gold arched over an aigrette of green. No wonder 

 the Egyptians never wearied of drawing the most beautiful of the rushes,, 

 the pith of which may still provide us with paper, since the Papyrus- 

 antiquorum grows in enormous quantities throughout tropical Africa 

 from the Zambezi to Fashoda, and from Zanzibar to Senegal. 



If you are quietly paddling in a canoe through these solitudes of the 

 lake shores — or, for the matter of that, near native villages, for he is not 

 shy — you may often come across a huge sun-dried crocodile of blue-grey 

 and sickly green, with dull black patches or spots, lying on the sandy 

 shore (his head, it may be, resting on a grassy bank), fast asleep, or at 

 any rate somnolent, in the delightful warmth, his dull reptilian brain 



i 



