370 
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
across their front. At nightfall^ as the red sunset faded, the 
lonely waters of the vast inland sea stretched, ocean-like, 
west and south into a shoreless gloom. Then the darkness 
deepened, the tropic stars blazed overhead, and the light 
of the half moon drowned in silver the embers of the sunset. 
Next morning we steamed along and across the equator; 
the last time we were to cross it, for thenceforth our course 
lay northward. We passed by many islands, green with 
meadow and forest, beautiful in the bright sunshine, but 
empty with the emptiness of death. A decade previously 
these islands were thronged with tribes of fisher folk; their 
villages studded the shores, and their long canoes, planks 
held together with fibre, furrowed the surface of the lake. 
Then, from out of the depths of the Congo forest came 
the dreadful scourge of the sleeping sickness, and smote 
the doomed peoples who dwelt beside the Victorian Nile, 
and on the coasts of the Nyanza Lakes and in the lands 
between. Its agent was a biting fly, brother to the tsetse 
whose bite is fatal to domestic animals. This fly dwells 
in forests, beside lakes and rivers; and wherever it dwells 
after the sleeping sickness came it was found that man 
could not live. In this country, between, and along the 
shores of, the great lakes, two hundred thousand people 
died in slow torment, before the hard-taxed wisdom and 
skill of medical science and governmental administration 
could work any betterment whatever in the situation. Men 
still die by thousands, and the disease is slowly spreading 
into fresh districts. But it has proved possible to keep it 
within limits in the regions already affected; yet only by 
absolutely abandoning certain districts, and by clearing 
all the forest and brush in tracts which serve as barriers to 
