180 WILD LIFE UNDER THE EQUATOR. 
In certain regions, from eleven o’clock till three, I cer- 
tainly thought I should lose my senses, especially when 
living on the banks of rivers. The most dreaded of all, 
and the most savage of these three species of flies, is the 
aboco. I shall never forget the iboco as long as I live. 
I have been stung too many times by them to forget it. 
A hot day, and under a powerful sun, these insects attack- 
ed us with a terrible persistency that left us no peace. 
The iboco is a large fly of the size of a hornet, with 
yellow body and a large green head ; it flies with a won- 
derful rapidity ; and when it wants to rest on somebody 
it whirls round and round so rapidly that the eyes become 
quite bewildered, and in the wink of an eye they rest on 
the bare back of some poor negro, and give a sting which 
draws often from him acry of anguish. ‘There is always 
great rejoicing when an iboco is killed. They are very 
plentiful in the regions of the Ovenga River; indeed, I 
have never seen them in such great numbers anywhere 
else. They like to be by the water and in open places. 
I have never seen them except in the clearings. 
Many and many times have I started as if stung by 
a scorpion or centipede, when it was nothing but an ibo- 
co, whose bill had gone through two or three of my gar- 
ments. Their bite is quite as painful as that of a scor- 
pion, but happily it is not venomous, and the pain does not 
last long; but its sharpness makes up for the shortness of 
its duration. Often the blood has run down my face or 
arm, from their savage attacks, and even the well-tanned 
skin of the negroes is punctured tillit bleeds, so that one 
would almost think that a leech had been at work on 
them. 
The nchouna has quite another sort of tactics. It is 
