176 AFRICAN NATURE NOTES CHAP. 



traps, all said that they could not live there because 

 of the tse-tse, which made them thin and weak, or, 

 as they expressed it, the tse-tse "killed them," just 

 as they say in times of famine that hunger is killing 

 them. 



In 1882 I met with a curious experience, for 

 which I cannot quite account. During that year I 

 had made an expedition from the high plateau of 

 Mashunaland to Zumbo, on the Zambesi, and had 

 had a somewhat hard time and gone through a 

 severe attack of fever. I had also been very much 

 bitten by tse-tse flies on the lower Panyami and 

 Umsengaisi rivers. Towards the end ot the year 

 I got back to the Mission Station of Umshlangeni 

 in Matabeleland, and was given a warm welcome 

 by my old friends the Rev. W. A. Elliott and his 

 wife. I reached the Mission Station late in the 

 evening, after a ride of fifty miles in the hot sun. I 

 was fairly well, having recovered from the attack of 

 fever, but perhaps a little run dow 7 n. 



Soon after I had turned in on the bed Mrs. 

 Elliott had arranged for me, I felt my nose coming 

 on to bleed. Not wanting to disturb any one, I 

 pulled a newspaper I had been reading from the 

 chair by my bedside, and spreading it on the floor, 

 let my nose bleed on to it. It bled a good deal, 

 and the next morning I was surprised to see that 

 the blood which had come from me was not like 

 blood at all, but slimy, yellow-looking stuff. When 

 I showed it to Mr. Elliott, I said to him that it 

 looked to me exactly like the blood of a " fly-stuck " 

 donkey which I had shot some years before at 

 Daka, and I laughingly suggested that I was " fly- 

 stuck " too. That something had affected the red 

 corpuscles of my blood seems certain, but whether 

 innumerable tse-tse fly bites or fever, or both 

 combined, had done it I cannot say. Ever since I 

 received an injury in the head in 1880, I have been 



