DOWN THE NILE; THE GIANT ELAND 447 



passed. Skinny, haggard old men and women, almost 

 naked, sat by the fires smoking long pipes; the younger 

 men and women laughed and jested as they moved among 

 the houses. One day, in the course of a long and fruitless 

 hunt, we stopped to rest near such a village, at about two 

 in the afternoon, having been walking hard since dawn. 

 We I and my gun-bearer, a black askari, a couple of 

 porters, and a native guide sat down under a big tree a 

 hundred yards from the village. Soon the chief and several 

 of his people came out to see us. The chief proudly wore 

 a dirty jersey and pair of drawers; a follower carried his 

 spear and the little wooden stool of dignity on which he 

 sat. There were a couple of warriors with him, one a man 

 in a bark apron with an old breech-loading rifle, the other 

 a stark-naked savage not a rag on him with a bow and 

 arrows; a very powerfully built man with a ferocious and 

 sinister face. Two women bore on their heads, as gifts for 

 us, one a large earthenware jar of water, the other a bas- 

 ket of groundnuts. They were tall and well-shaped. One 

 as her sole clothing wore a beaded cord around her 

 waist, and a breechclout consisting of half a dozen long, 

 thickly leaved, fresh sprays of a kind of vine; the other, 

 instead of this vine breechclout, had hanging from her 

 girdle in front a cluster of long-stemmed green leaves, 

 and behind a bundle of long strings, carried like a horse's 

 tail. 



The weather was very hot, and the country, far and 

 wide, was a waste of barren desolation. The flats of end- 

 less thorn scrub were broken by occasional low and rugged 

 hills, and in the empty watercourses the pools were many 

 miles apart. Yet there was a good deal of game. We saw 



