CHAPTER XVIII 



VOYAGE UP WHITE NILE (continued) 

 THE WESTERN BEND (BY THE ZERAF RIVER) 



(i) A MORNING IN A MARSH 



DURING the night we had anchored opposite a sedge-clad 

 bog" wherein the year before I had wounded (and lost) an 

 unknown prize a "Porphyrio" of sorts, but one that 

 enjoys no allotted place in the Sudan avifauna. 1 Beyond 

 the bog, a mile away, a tempting forest displayed two 

 great stick-built nests, by one of which stood perched a 

 giant jabiru it was the old attraction of "Caldecot's 

 Spinny " in Tom Brown. I resolved to reach those great 

 nests at any cost, and plunged into the interposed marsh, 

 ecstatic in varied anticipations. At the end of an hour 

 those ecstasies were cooling. A ceaseless struggle through 

 canes, each as strong and as stubborn as a mule, combined 

 with an entanglement of khors that embogged above 

 the knee, had tended to pale the more roseate aspect 

 of mundane things. At this juncture I found myself 

 face to face with a sinister-looking savage. He was 

 immensely tall most Shilluks are and carried a coal- 

 shovel spear, while right across his chest stretched a 

 great gaping gash, half-healed ; then his face . . . well, 

 I only saw it once, but that glimpse sufficed. My visual 

 sense recoils from a sickening memory. To put it mildly, 



1 A big waterhen-like bird, dull sage-green in colour with a " fever- 

 green " beak and frontal plate. Later I saw another similar, twenty miles 

 west of Zeraf, but failed to procure either they .were too big for the 

 "collecting-gun"; so there remains " something new "in Sudan. 



226 



