370 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



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 light 

 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 thenceforth 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. Its 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 by clearing 

 all the forest and brush in tracts which serve as barriers to 



