246 CROCODILES 



the flavour of the animal was considered to be superior 

 there to that of ' down-river crocodiles,' just as some 

 people praise an Arundel sole or an Amberley trout. 



Herodotus, to whose method of setting down what 

 he saw or heard, however incredible it might appear, 

 time is always doing justice, has two excellent testi- 

 monials as to his crocodile stories. One is Strabo, and 

 the other Mr. Brehm. Strabo was taken by a priest 

 to see a sacred crocodile kept in a pond at Arsinoe. 

 ' Our host/ he writes, ' who was a person of importance, 

 and our guide to all sacred sights, went with us to the 

 tank, taking with him from a table a small cake, some 

 roast meat, and a small cup of mulled wine. We found 

 the crocodile lying on the bank. The priests imme- 

 diately went up to him, and while some of them opened 

 his mouth, another put in the cake and crammed down 

 the meat, and finished by pouring in the wine.' We 

 are not surprised to hear that after the last dose the 

 crocodile 'jumped into the water and swam away.' 

 Brehm saw what Herodotus did not see, the manners 

 and customs of the crocodiles on the White Nile at the 

 time when the river-bed becomes the resort of the 

 greater part of the bird population of that portion of 

 the Soudan. This occurs at low Nile, when the water- 

 supply elsewhere disappears, and the sandbanks are 

 the nightly resting-place of millions of cranes, storks, 

 ibises, pelicans and geese. In the evening these sand- 



