HUNTING AND HUNTED IN BELGIAN CONGO 



black fez cap, jabbering away in flowery Swahili as the 

 boys yelled with delight at his misfortune. 



I shall never forget the horrors of that night, wind, 

 rain, thunder and lightning, the like of which it is im- 

 possible to compare with anything to be seen in Europe. 

 I have lain down to sleep in torrential downpours in 

 Zululand, lying in a sort of channel with the water running 

 in at the neck of my shirt and coursing through it and 

 coming out at the bottom of my trousers. I have spent 

 nights under the most adverse circumstances in a dozen 

 different countries, but I have never experienced anything 

 to compare with the discomforts of that night spent on 

 the upper Nile, without a mosquito net, close to the 

 marshes from which comes the dreaded malarial mosquito, 

 whose untiring attentions made life unbearable. 



One man I knew, just out from the Old Country, was 

 worried by them to such an extent as to come near 

 losing his reason. Not only do the mosquitoes attack one 

 at night, but along the Nile they are sometimes so bad 

 during the day that I have had to walk up and down the 

 camp while eating my food ! Some of them even pene- 

 trate the finest mesh net. One means of avoiding them 

 in the evening was to sit in the trail of the smoke from the 

 fires. On the night I have just described I had a bottle of 

 some preparation that was strongly recommended for 

 keeping away the mosquito — we had bought it in fact 

 with the medicine chests at the sale of stores from the 

 Roosevelt safari — but like many of the vaunted pre- 

 ventives of sea-sickness, it proved quite ineffective. 

 One scientist has stated that one hundred and fifty 

 million germs have to be got into the system before the 

 first symptoms of malarial fever are seen. I think a 

 few nights without a mosquito net on the Nile would be 

 sufficient to gather this little party together ! 



How I longed for the dawn to break as I sat there 

 during the long hours enveloped in blankets, still smoking 



90 



