418 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



this point the Nile was miles wide, and was divided into 

 curving channels which here and there spread into lake- 

 like expanses of still water. Along the edges of the river 

 and between the winding channels and lagoons grew vast 

 water-fields of papyrus, their sheets and bands of dark 

 green breaking the burnished silver of the sunlit waters. 

 Beyond the further bank rose steep, sharply peaked hills. 

 The tricolored fish eagles, striking to the eye because of 

 their snow-white heads and breasts, screamed continually, 

 a wild eerie sound. Cormorants and snake birds were 

 perched on trees overhanging the water, and flew away, or 

 plunged like stones into the stream, as I approached; her- 

 ons of many kinds rose from the marshy edges of the bays 

 and inlets; wattled and spur-winged plovers circled over- 

 head; and I saw a party of hippopotami in a shallow on 

 the other side of the nearest channel, their lazy bulks raised 

 above water as they basked asleep in the sun. The semi- 

 diurnal slate-and-yellow bats flitted from one scantily leaved 

 tree to another, as I disturbed them. At the foot of a steep 

 bluff, several yards from the water, a crocodile lay. I 

 broke its neck with a soft-nosed bullet from the little Spring- 

 field; for the plated skin of a crocodile offers no resistance 

 to a modern rifle. We dragged the ugly man-eater up the 

 bank, and sent one of the porters back to camp to bring out 

 enough men to carry the brute in bodily. It was a female, 

 containing thirty eggs. We did not find any crocodile's 

 nest; but near camp, in digging a hole for the disposal of 

 refuse, we came on a clutch of a dozen eggs of the monitor 

 lizard. They were in sandy loam, two feet and a half be- 

 neath the surface, without the vestige of a burrow leading 

 to them. When exposed to the sun, unlike the crocodile's 



