NORTH-EASTERN RHODESIA 117 



peculiar fascination. The rugged grandeur of 

 mountain ranges, the placid peace of lakes and 

 rivers, the strenuous life of a busy city have 

 each their very own attractions. It is perhaps 

 difficult to imagine that the desire to return to 

 the interminable sands of a desert could become 

 real in civilized man, or that the monotony of 

 the great, dreary swalmps of Central Africa could 

 ever call one back to those solitudes of disease 

 and unending desolation. And yet there is an 

 indefinable something in those melancholy marsh 

 lands, a subtle fascination which bites into one's 

 very soul, and creates a strange longing when 

 the roar of modern life is at its loudest once again 

 to hear the night winds sighing through the reeds 

 of the Bangweolo and Mweru swamps. Once 

 again one sees the treacherous sudd rising and 

 falling like the billows of the ocean, once again 

 one hears the mournful cries of the fisher birds 

 as they hover over one of the backwaters of 

 Luchya, and the realization that they are but 

 remembrances of the past produces an insatiable 

 desire to make them of the present. 



Picture to yourself an illimitable stretch of 

 reeds and evil-smelling pools where the water 

 is iridescent and the fever fiends revel in their 

 ideal haunts. As far as the eye can see there 

 is nothing but marsh and mire. The hot, murky 

 sky seems to blend with the all-pervading 

 monotony of the marshes, so that there is no 

 real sky-line, merely a blur in the distance where 

 the rank vegetation and the stagnant pools 

 merge with the heavens. Far away to the east 

 are the plains which fringe the swamps, vast 

 and dreary expanses where there is but little 

 water, and where one may see in the heat of 



