Chap. IX. TEAPS AXD PITFALLS. 187 



hood in pitfalls. Sharp-pointed stakes are set in the bottom, 

 on which the game tumbles and gets impaled. The natives 

 are careful to warn strangers of these traps, and also 

 of the poisoned beams suspended on the tall trees for the 

 purpose of killing elephants and hippopotami. It is not 

 difficult to detect the pitfalls after one's attention has been 

 called to them ; but in places where they are careful to cany 

 the earth off to a distance, and a person is not thinking of 

 such things, a sudden descent of nine feet is an experience 

 not easily forgotten by the traveller. The sensations of one 

 thus instantaneously swallowed up by the earth are peculiar. 

 A momentary suspension of consciousness is followed by 

 the rustling sound of a shower of sand and dry grass, and 

 the half-bewildered thought of where he is, and how he 

 came into darkness. Reason awakes to assure him that he 

 must have come down through that small opening of day- 

 light overhead, and that he is now where a hippopotamus 

 ought to have been. The descent of a hippopotamus pitfall is 

 easy, like that of Avernus, but to get out again into the 

 upper air is a work of labour. The sides are smooth and 

 treacherous, and the cross reeds, which support the covering, 

 break in the attempt to get out by clutching them. A cry 

 from the depths is unheard by those around, and it is only by 

 repeated and most desperate efforts that the buried alive can 

 regain the upper world. At Tette we were told of a white 

 hunter, of unusually small stature, who plumped into a pit 

 while stalking a guinea-fowl on a tree. It was the labour 

 of an entire forenoon to get out; and he was congratulat- 

 ing himself on his escape, and brushing off the clay from 

 his clothes, when down he went into a second pit, which 

 happened, as is often the case, to be close beside the first, 

 and it was evening before he could work himself out of that. 



