ira er 
Epa + 
MSUATA, ~ .. 191 
has loudly smacked a limb that has been smartly bitten 
by the great mandibles of these headstrong insects. The 
charm has vanished, the picture is dispersed. The egrets 
and the herons are flying to far-off shores, the pelicans 
flop into the water, and thence scutter away, half swimming, 
half flying, till they are out of sight, while the outraged 
plovers, with their loud, almost human cry, wake up the 
crocodiles, and, having seen their friends glide smoothly 
into the deep, they address a few more invectives to our 
party, and then flap their black-and-white wings over the | 
water to a point further along the shore, where they fold 
their attractive pinions under modest grey wing-coverts, 
and strut about the beach in self-satisfied conceit at having 
baulked the slaughterous propensities of those odious men. 
However, the surroundings of this bird and _ crocodile 
erouping still remain, and are worth studying in them- 
selves. There is the fallen tree in the foreground, in 
sharply contrasted light and dark, and beneath it the 
_ yellow sand and green ooze. Then the stretch of tranquil 
water, reflecting first the variegated sky with its cloud 
effects of iron-grey and snowy white dappled with patches 
of bright blue—the tone of the red sandy bottom shining 
warmly through this reflection in the shallows —and 
beyond, the glassy reproduction of the wall of forest in the 
middle distance, which but for the occasional scratches of 
silvery white where the light breeze ruffles the water, 
would seem as real as the reality above it. In the actual 
forest, although it is separated from you by a few hundred 
yards of river, much detail may be observed in the clear 
noon-day sunlight. There are the purple depths of shade 
and the glowing masses of yellow-green foliage; there are 
the white skeletons of dead and leafless trees and the 
fanciful trellis-work of emerald-green calamus palms, 
trailing their disorderly fronds over the water’s edge and 
curving their prying, impertinent heads into every gulf of 
vegetation, and peeping over the tops of the highest trees. 
Beyond the forest, the background is the sky, and what 
a heaven it is to gaze at! In Africa, during the rainy 
season, the cloudscapes are pictures in themselves. Those 
noble masses of vapour which begin in tiny shapes of 
