DOWN THE NILE; THE GIANT ELAND 513 



basket of ground-nuts. 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 

 buffalo, giraffe, and elephant; and on our way back to 

 camp in the evenings we now and then killed a roan, harte- 

 beest, or oribi. But the game we sought was the giant 

 eland, and we never fired when there was the slightest 

 chance of disturbing our quarry. They usually went in 

 herds, but there were solitary bulls. We found that they 

 drank at some pool in the Koda before dawn and then 

 travelled many miles back into the parched interior, feed- 

 ing as they went; and, after lying up for some hours about 

 mid-day, again moved slowly off, feeding. They did not 

 graze, but fed on the green leaves, and the bean pods of the 

 tree of which I have already spoken and of another tree. 

 One of their marked habits shared in some degree by 

 their forest cousin, the bongo was breaking the higher 

 branches with their horns, to get at the leaves; they thus 

 broke branches two or three inches in diameter and seven 

 or eight feet from the ground, the crash of the branches 

 being a sound for which we continually listened as we 

 followed the tracks of a herd. They were far more wary 

 than roan, or hartebeest, or any of the other buck, and the 

 country was such that it was difficult to see more than a 

 couple of hundred yards ahead. 



It took me three hard days' work before I got my eland. 

 Each day I left camp before sunrise and on the first two I 



