CHAPTER X 



Game en route — Serut flies — Lake Fell and mosquitoes — Godelpus Island 

 — Up the river — Two narrow escapes- Wau — Preparing for the Sirdar 

 — Cannibal Sultans — The Sirdar arrives — The levee — A native dance — 

 I fear black water fever — Two elephant hunts — A buffalo — The African 

 dawn — I reach Dem Zubeir — My two subordinates. 



At Fashoda we learned that Lake No would probably 

 be rendered unenterable owing to the sudd. Fortu- 

 nately by the time we reached it the wind had started 

 blowing from the north-east, so that we found a 

 perfectly clear waterway in front of us. This was 

 fortunate, as the Sirdar's visit to the Bahr el Ghazal 

 depended on our report to a great extent, for a man 

 in his position could not afford to lose several days, 

 perhaps months, locked up in a sudd block. 



We saw any amount of game en route. Elephants 

 and all sorts of antelopes, including Mrs. Gray Kob 

 (inaccessible), but our instructions being to hurry 

 we could not go after them much. Of birds the rarest 

 seen were the baliniceps-rex, of which we passed five 

 or six. A lion yawning on an ant-heap, and sur- 

 rounded by countless white-eared cob, tempted our 

 fire, but he disappeared in the long grass when he 

 saw where it came from. We were almost driven mad 

 by serut flies, which infest these rivers. They are 

 about an inch long, and like an exaggerated horse 



