A WOODING STATION. 165 



Half an hour's steaming brought us to the wood-station, 

 a thick forest of considerable extent, on the edge of which, 

 close by the lake shore, Boki's people have erected their huts. 

 Here, in spite of all our foresight and precautions, we had a 

 bad night of it ; a kind of cyclone raged from midnight till 

 morning, and several times made us anxious about the steamer. 

 Early next morning all hands were got to work at felling 

 trees, and the inhabitants of the place rendered first rate 

 service with their boats in getting the wood on board the 

 Khedive. From here the eastern shore of the lake was pretty 

 plainly visible as a chain of hills having a north- south axis. 

 When the mist cleared off, we also saw another distinct 

 mountain mass, situated farther north, the middle of which 

 bore east by south (103°); this I concluded was Jebel 

 Ge'isi, near Kiroto. An expedition into the forest on shore 

 did not reward us for our trouble, and we were soon compelled 

 by the buffaloes to return. 



The trees we felled in this locality were mostly JDiospyros 

 mespiliformis, an excellent material for firing purposes, and 

 one that is greatly liked for building. It has a fresh reddish 

 colour and a pleasant smell ; when felled, it soon assumes a 

 beautiful darker tint. It resists the attacks of termites pretty 

 well, yet it did not answer, we found, for boatbuilding ; but 

 it serves excellently for making gunstocks, especially when it 

 has been buried for some time in the ground. I also observed 

 another sweet-smelling species of timber amongst the firewood 

 brought on board, but I could not ascertain from what tree it 

 came. I am inclined to think that it was a species of Vitex. 



All along the river and in the lake I was struck with the 

 relatively small number of species of water-birds. Farther 

 north, in the Bahr-el-Abiad, between 1 2° and 15° N. lat., 

 water-birds and marsh-birds occur in innumerable flocks, while 

 to the south, in the localities mentioned, one cannot find a 

 single duck or goose ; and although we can explain this 

 very marked difference during the winter season (November to 

 March) by the fact that large numbers of European emigrants 

 on their way to the south do not proceed beyond the marshy 

 tract between Sobat and Ghaba Shambe, still this will not 

 account for the paucity of species, and for the small number of 



