428 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



decade previously these islands were thronged with tribes 

 of fisher folk; their villages studded the shores, and their 

 long canoes, planks held together with fibre, furrowed the 

 surface of the lake. Then, from out of the depths of 

 the Congo forest came the dreadful scourge of the sleep- 

 ing sickness, and smote the doomed peoples who dwelt 

 beside the Victorian Nile, and on the coasts of the Ny- 

 anza Lakes and in the lands between. Its agent was a 

 biting fly, brother to the tsetse whose bite is fatal to 

 domestic animals. This fly dwells in forests, beside lakes 

 and rivers; and wherever it dwells after the sleeping 

 sickness came it was found that man could not live. 

 In this country, between, and along the shores of, the 

 great lakes, two hundred thousand people died in slow 

 torment, before the hard-taxed wisdom and skill of med- 

 ical science and governmental administration could work 

 any betterment whatever in the situation. Men still die 

 by thousands, and the disease is slowly spreading into 

 fresh districts. But it has proved possible to keep it 

 within limits in the regions already affected; yet only by 

 absolutely abandoning certain districts, and by clearing 

 all the forest and brush in tracts which serve as barriers to 

 the fly, and which permit passage through the infected 

 belts. On the western shores of Victoria Nyanza, and in 

 the islands adjacent thereto, the ravages of the pestilence 

 were such, the mortality it caused was so appalling, that 

 the government was finally forced to deport all the sur- 

 vivors inland, to forbid all residence beside or fishing in 

 the lake, and with this end in view to destroy the villages 

 and the fishing fleets of the people. The teeming lake 

 fish were formerly a main source of food supply to all who 

 dwelt near by; but this has now been cut off, and the 

 myriads of fish are left to themselves, to the hosts of water 

 birds, and to the monstrous man-eating crocodiles of the 

 lake, on whose blood the fly also feeds, and whence it is 

 supposed by some that it draws the germs so deadly to 

 humankind. 



