Chap. V. ELEPHANTS — WHITE ANTS. 131 



can regain the upper world. At Tette we are 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 

 congratulating 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. 



Elephants and buffaloes seldom return to the river by 

 the same path on two successive nights, they become so 

 apprehensive of danger from this human art. An old 

 elephant will walk in advance of the herd, and uncover 

 the pits with his trunk, that the others may see the open- 

 ings and tread on firm ground. Female elephants are 

 generally the victims : more timid by nature than the 

 males, and very motherly in their anxiety for their calves, 

 they carry their trunks up, trying every breeze for fancied 

 danger, which often in reality lies at their feet. The 

 tusker, fearing less, keeps his trunk down, and, warned in 

 time by that exquisitely sensitive organ, takes heed to his 

 ways. 



Our camp on the Sinjere stood under a wide-spreading 

 wild fig-tree. From the numbers of this family, of large 

 size, dotted over the country, the fig or banyan species 

 would seem to have been held sacred in Africa from the 

 remotest times. The soil teemed with white ants, whose 

 clay tunnels, formed to screen them from the eyes of birds, 

 thread over the ground, up the trunks of trees, and along 

 the branches, from which the little architects clear away all 

 rotten or dead wood. Very often the exact shape of branches 

 is left in tunnels on the ground and not a bit of the wood 

 inside. The first night we passed here these destructive in- 

 sects ate through our grass-beds, and attacked our blankets, 

 and certain large red-headed ones even bit our flesh. 



