198 After Big Game in Central Africa 



in the nearest object, whether it be a heap of straw or 

 your own bed. The lantern, by the light of which 

 you are eating your soupe, attracts and causes to fall 

 into it either wood-lice which poison it, or lady-birds 

 which colour it. Or, a dung-beetle, the sacred insect 

 of the Egyptians, after having rolled about among 

 the filthiest things (even where butterflies and bees 

 settle), 1 and promenaded around the camp, walks 

 across your face or over your biscuit. Your sugar is 

 always covered by a small red swarm of minute ants 

 whose speciality is sugar, fat, oil, butter, in short, 

 everything which you would especially like to be 

 without ants. Water is sometimes full of leeches, or 

 else contains larvae, which leave you one fine day in 

 the form of guinea- worms. White ants emerge from 

 the earth on all sides, and, respecting iron only, eat 

 into your packages. Bugs, imported by the Arabs 

 (longer in shape and more slender than the European 

 kind), invade certain villages to such an extent that 

 the blacks desert their huts, sleep outside, and end 

 by burning their hamlet and everything they possess 

 before going elsewhere. Fleas, larger than those 

 which infest our dogs, are rarer, but none the less 

 hungry ; they attack the body, while their still more 

 voracious sisters, the jiggers, penetrate the flesh of 

 the feet, which they devour, and -in which they lay 

 thousands of eggs. If you eat by lamplight your 

 plate is full of insects ; if you take your meal in the 

 dark, strange, new, and indescribable tastes tell you 

 that you eat them all the same, although in smaller 



1 See Mes Grandes Chasses, p. 277. 



