276 DOWN AN UNKNOWN RIVER [chap, ix 



prongbuck whose curiosity has been aroused. In the 

 gloom of the forest the bird was hard to see, but the 

 flashing of this patch of white feathers revealed it at 

 once, attracting immediate attention. It was an 

 excellent example of a coloration mark which served a 

 purely advertising purpose ; apparently it was part of a 

 courtship display. The bird was about thirty feet up in 

 the branches. 



In the morning, just before leaving this camp, a tapir 

 swam across stream a little way above us ; but unfortu^ 

 nately we could not get a shot at it. An ample supply 

 of tapir beef would have meant much to us. We had 

 started with fifty days' rations; but this by no means 

 meant full rations, in the sense of giving every man all 

 he wanted to eat. We had two meals a day, and were 

 on rather short commons — both our mess and the 

 camaradas' — except when we got plenty of palm-tops. 

 For our mess we had the boxes chosen by Fiala, each 

 containing a day's rations for six men, our number. But 

 we made each box last a day and a half, or at times two 

 days, and in addition we gave some of the food to the 

 camaradas. It was only on the rare occasions when we 

 had killed some monkeys or curassows, or caught some 

 fish, that everybody had enough. We would have 

 welcomed that tapir. So far the game, fish, and fruit 

 had been too scarce to be an element of weight in our 

 food supply. In an exploring trip hke ours, through a 

 difficult and utterly unknown country, especially if 

 densely forested, there is Uttle time to halt, and game 

 cannot be counted on. It is only in lands hke our own 

 West thirty years ago, like South Africa in the middle 

 of the last century, like East Africa to-day, that game 

 can be made the chief food supply. On this trip our 

 only substantial food supply from the country hitherto 



