424 
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
he owned a red fez and a pair of baggy blue breeches, 
which last he generally carried over his shoulder. His 
people were very scantily clad indeed, and a few of them, 
both men and women, wore absolutely nothing except a 
string of blue beads around the waist or neck. Their 
ears had not been pierced and stretched like so many 
East African savages, but their lower lips were pierced 
for wooden ornaments and quills. They brought us eggs 
and chickens, which we paid for with American cloth; this 
cloth, and some umbrellas, constituting our stock of trade 
goods, or gift goods, for the Nile. 
The following day Sururu himself led us to our next 
camp, only a couple of hours away. It was a dry country 
of harsh grass, everywhere covered by a sparse growth of 
euphorbias and stunted thorns, which were never in suffi¬ 
cient numbers to make a forest, each little, wellnigh leaf¬ 
less tree, standing a dozen rods or so distant from its nearest 
fellow. Most of the grass had been burnt, and fires were 
still raging. Our camp was by a beautiful pond, covered 
with white and lilac water-lilies. We pitched our two 
tents on a bluff, under some large acacias that cast real 
shade. It was between two and three degrees north of the 
equator. The moon, the hot January moon of the mid¬ 
tropics, was at the full, and the nights were very lovely; 
the little sheet of water glimmered in the moon rays, and 
round about the dry landscape shone with a strange, spec¬ 
tral light. 
Near the pond, just before camping, I shot a couple of 
young waterbuck bulls for food, and while we were pitching 
the tents a small herd of elephants—cows, young bulls, 
and calves, seemingly disturbed by a grass fire which was 
