DOWN THE NILE; THE GIANT ELAND 447 
passed. Skinny, haggard old men and women, almost 
naked, sat by the fires smoking long pipes; the younger 
men and women laughed and jested as they moved among 
the houses. One day, in the course of a long and fruitless 
hunt, we stopped to rest near such a village, at about two 
in the afternoon, having been walking hard since dawn. 
We—I and my gun-bearer, a black askari, a couple of 
porters, and a native guide—sat down under a big tree a 
hundred yards from the village. Soon the chief and several 
of his people came out to see us. The chief proudly wore 
a dirty jersey and pair of drawers; a follower carried his 
spear and the little wooden stool of dignity on which he 
sat. There were a couple of warriors with him, one a man 
in a bark apron with an old breech-loading rifle, the other 
a stark-naked savage—not a rag on him—with a bow and 
arrows; a very powerfully built man with a ferocious and 
sinister face. Two women bore on their heads, as gifts for 
us, one a large earthenware jar of water, the other a bas¬ 
ket of groundnuts. They were tall and well-shaped. One 
as her sole clothing wore a beaded cord around her 
waist, and a breechclout consisting of half a dozen long, 
thickly leaved, fresh sprays of a kind of vine; the other, 
instead of this vine breechclout, had hanging from her 
girdle in front a cluster of long-stemmed green leaves, 
and behind a bundle of long strings, carried like a horse’s 
tail. 
The weather was very hot, and the country, far and 
wide, was a waste of barren desolation. The flats of end¬ 
less thorn scrub were broken by occasional low and rugged 
hills, and in the empty watercourses the pools were many 
miles apart. Yet there was a good deal of game. We saw 
