364 UGANDA [ch. xiii 



forbidding beauty. Dark clouds hung over the land 

 we had left, and a rainbow stretched across their front. 

 At nightfall, as the red sunset faded, the lonely waters 

 of the vast inland sea stretched, ocean-like, west and 

 south into a shoreless gloom. Then the darkness 

 deepened, the tropic stars blazed overhead, and the 

 lioht of the half-moon drowned in silver the embers 

 of the sunset. 



Next morning we steamed along and across the 

 Equator — the last time we were to cross it, for thence- 

 forth our course lay northward. We passed by many 

 islands, green with meadow and forest, beautiful in the 

 bright sunshine, but empty with the emptiness of death. A 

 decade previously these islands were thronged with tribes 

 of fisher-folk ; their villages studded the shores, and their 

 long canoes, planks held together with fibre, furrowed 

 the surface of the lake. Then, from out of the depths 

 of the Congo forest came the dreadful scourge of the 

 sleeping sickness, and smote the doomed peoples who 

 dwelt beside the Victorian Nile, and on the coasts of 

 the Nyanza Lakes, and in the lands between, lis agent 

 was a biting fly, brother to the tsetse, whose bite is fatal 

 to domestic animals. This fly dwells in forests, beside 

 lakes and rivers ; and wherever it dwells, after the 

 sleeping sickness came, it was found that man could not 

 live. In this country, between and along the shores of 

 the great lakes, two hundred thousand people died in 

 slow torment before the hard-taxed wisdom and skill 

 of medical science and governmental administration 

 could work any betterment whatever in the situation. 

 Men still die by thousands, and the disease is slowly 

 spreading into fresh districts. But it has proved possible 

 to keep it within limits in the regions already affected ; 

 yet only by absolutely abandoning certain districts, and 



