490 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



trees, and patches of scrawny cultivation, round the little 

 cluster of huts, ringed with a thorn fence, through which 

 led a low door; and the natives owned goats and chickens. 

 Sururu himself wore a white sheet of cotton as a toga, and 

 he owned a red fez and a pair of baggy blue breeches, 

 which last he generally carried over his shoulder. His 

 people were very scantily clad indeed, and a few of them, 

 both men and women, wore absolutely nothing except a 

 string of blue beads around the waist or neck. Their 

 ears had not been pierced and stretched like so many 

 East African savages, but their lower lips were pierced 

 for wooden ornaments and quills. They brought us eggs 

 and chickens, which we paid for with American cloth; this 

 cloth, and some umbrellas, constituting our stock of trade 

 goods, or gift goods, for the Nile. 



The following day Sururu himself led us to our next 

 camp, only a couple of hours away. It was a dry country 

 of harsh grass, everywhere covered by a sparse growth of 

 euphorbias and stunted thorns, which were never in suffi- 

 cient numbers to make a forest, each little, wellnigh leaf- 

 less tree, standing a dozen rods or so distant from its nearest 

 fellow. Most of the grass had been burnt, and fires were 

 still raging. Our camp was by a beautiful pond, covered 

 with white and lilac water-lilies. We pitched our two 

 tents on a bluff, under some large acacias that cast real 

 shade. It was between two and three degrees north of the 

 equator. The moon, the hot January moon of the mid- 

 tropics, was at the full, and the nights were very lovely; 

 the little sheet of water glimmered in the moon rays, and 

 round about the dry landscape shone with a strange, spec- 

 tral light. 



Near the pond, just before camping, I shot a couple of 

 young waterbuck bulls for food, and while we were pitching 

 the tents a small herd of elephants cows, young bulls, 

 and calves, seemingly disturbed by a grass fire which was 

 burning a little way off, came up within four hundred yards 

 of us. At first we mistook one large cow for a bull, and 



