406 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



the grass, and now and then turned a small tree nearly 

 white by all perching in it. The little bank swallows came 

 in myriads; exactly the same, by the way, as our familiar 

 home friends, for the bank swallow is the most widely 

 distributed of all birds. The most conspicuous attend- 

 ants of the fires, however, were the bee-eaters, the largest 

 and handsomest we had yet seen, their plumage every 

 shade of blended red and rose, varied with brilliant blue 

 and green. The fires seemed to bother the bigger animals 

 hardly at all. The game did not shift their haunts, or do 

 more than move in quite leisurely fashion out of the line of 

 advance of the flames. I saw two oribi which had found a 

 patch of short grass that split the fire, feeding thereon, 

 entirely undisturbed, although the flames were crackling 

 by some fifty yards on each side of them. Even the mice 

 and shrews did not suffer much, probably because they 

 went into holes. Shrews, by the way, were very plentiful, 

 and Loring trapped four kinds, two of them new. It was 

 always a surprise to me to find these tiny shrews swarming 

 in Equatorial Africa just as they swarm in Arctic America. 

 In a little patch of country not far from this camp there 

 were a few sleeping-sickness fly, and one or two of us were 

 bitten, but, seemingly, the fly were not infected, although 

 at this very time eight men were dying of sleeping sickness 

 at Wadelai where we had stopped. There were also some 

 ordinary tsetse fly, which caused us uneasiness about our 

 mule. We had brought four little mules through Uganda, 

 riding them occasionally on safari; and had taken one 

 across into the Lado, while the other three, with the bulk 

 of the porters, marched on the opposite bank of the Nile 

 from Koba, and were to join us at Nimule. 



