A TERRIBLE DAYS MARCH 



waste through which we had fought but yesterday. 

 1 date my first attack of malarial fever from that 

 march through the swamp. A number of the boys 

 were suffering from ague. I felt far from fit. I had a 

 sickening headache, and all the strength was gone from 

 me. My temperature at eight a.m. was 1023. My 

 first care was to organise search parties for the missing 

 boys. Before despatching the searchers, I fired two 

 rounds of the "450, so that the wanderers might gauge 

 in what direction our camp lay. I remember how over 

 the white mist which still hung above the swamp that 

 extended towards the Bora reaches in the east, the loud 

 report of the gun slowly found its way for miles as it 

 crept towards the hills at the back of the Nile. Have 

 you ever heard a field gun fired from an eminence across 

 a valley or hollow piece of country, how it rattles away 

 in the distance with a moaning and whistling that 

 suddenly pulls up short as it reaches the higher country 

 opposite ? There is something unutterably weird in the 

 effect of a gun shot just at daybreak, when the great 

 hollow and silent country beneath you is enshrouded 

 in a white mantle of mist. The report is increased 

 tenfold as it spreads itself in all directions, startling the 

 dogs and prowling animals of the wilds for miles around. 

 Flocks of birds fly up from the mist heavenwards and cry 

 loudly as they take to flight. Monkeys scamper off, 

 crying out in alarm as they swing from tree to tree. The 

 great and almost sacred silence is broken ; to the natives 

 in the surrounding country the report causes alarm, and 

 drums are soon tapping messages from village to village. 

 A gun : think what it means to the people of the Congo ! 

 In the villages all sorts of pictures are conjured up in their 

 imaginations. Perhaps the women and children busy 

 themselves transporting the precious store of grain from 

 the queer mud and grass granaries, that stand on rude 

 wooden platforms raised from the ground on poles in 



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