390 RHINOCEROS OF THE LADO [ch. xiv 
was no forest; but scattered over the plains were trees, 
generally thorns, but other kinds also, among them 
palms and euphorbias. 
The following morning, forty-eight hours after leaving 
Butiaba, on Lake Albert Nyanza, we disembarked from 
the little flotilla which had carried us—a crazy little 
steam-launch, two sail-boats, and two big row-boats. 
We made our camp close to the river’s edge, on the 
Lado side, in a thin grove of scattered thorn-trees. 
The grass grew rank and tall all about us. Our tents 
were pitched, and the grass huts of the porters built, on 
a kind of promontory, the main stream running past 
one side, while on the other was a bay. The nights 
were hot, and the days burning; the mosquitoes came 
with darkness, sometimes necessitating our putting on 
head-nets and gloves in the evenings, and they would 
have made sleep impossible if we had not had mosquito 
biers. Nevertheless it was a very pleasant camp, and 
we thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a wild, lonely 
country, and we saw no human beings except an 
occasional party of naked savages armed with bows 
and poisoned arrows. Game was plentiful, and a 
hunter always enjoys a permanent camp in a good 
game country; for while the expedition is marching, 
his movements must largely be regulated by those of 
the safari, whereas at a permanent camp he is more 
independent. 
There was an abundance of animal life, big and little, 
about our camp. In the reed sand among the water- 
lilies of the bay there were crocodiles, monitor lizards 
six feet long, and many water birds—herons, flocks of 
beautiful white egrets, clamorous spur-winged plover, 
sacred ibis, noisy purple ibis, saddle-billed storks, and 
lily-trotters, which ran lightly over the lily-pad s. There 
