XIII 
THE CROCODILE 
35 
exhibition of these mighty forms, that no change 
in the inhabitants of the stream had taken place 
since the original creation. 
Crocodiles, like all other creatures, vary in their 
characters according to the conditions under which 
they exist. Although they prey upon any living 
thing that comes within their reach, they, as inhabit¬ 
ants of the water, are by nature fish-eaters. When 
cutting wearily during two seasons through the 
dense obstructions of aquatic vegetation which had 
closed the navigation of the White Nile, we occa¬ 
sionally entered upon horrible solitudes of shallow 
swamp, peopled by countless snakes ; the air, sultry 
and redolent of malaria, was humming with mos¬ 
quitoes ; and in this chaos, if a few square yards of 
sandbank appeared above the marsh, there were 
the belly scales of some large crocodile printed 
upon the surface. Nothing could be more horrible 
than such associations : the loud hoarse snorts of 
the hippopotamus at night, and the reptiles that 
were present in the daylight; these formed a 
combination which conveyed an indelible impression 
of antediluvian realities. This was the natural 
position of the crocodile, in which fish must have 
constituted its nourishment. 
I remember upon one occasion, in the Albert 
Nyanza, we found one half of a fish [Perea 
Nilotica ) that was bitten as clean through as 
though divided by a knife ; this was the work of 
a snap from the jaws of a crocodile. The fish 
would have weighed about 70 lbs. when w T hole. 
