398 RHINOCEROS OF THE LADO [ch. xiy 
Wherever they came together there would be a 
moment’s spurt of roaring, crackling fire, and then it 
would vanish, leaving at that point a blank in the circle 
of flame. Gradually the blanks in the lines extended, 
until the fire thus burnt itself out, and darkness 
succeeded the bright red glare. 
The fires continued to burn in our neighbourhood for 
a couple of days. Finally, one evening the great beds 
of papyrus across the bay caught fire. After nightfall it 
was splendid to see the line of flames leaping fifty feet 
into the air as they worked across the serried masses of 
tall papyrus. When they came toward the water they 
kindled the surface of the bay into a ruddy glare, while 
above them the crimson smoke-clouds drifted slowly to 
leeward. The fire did not die out until toward morning, 
and then, behind it, w r e heard the grand booming chorus 
of a party of lions. They were full fed, and roaring as 
they went to their day beds; each would utter a succes¬ 
sion of roars, which grew louder and louder until they 
fairly thundered, and then died gradually away, until 
they ended in a succession of sighs and grunts. 
As the fires burned to and fro across the country, 
birds of many kinds came to the edge of the flames to 
pick up the insects which were driven out. There were 
marabou storks, kites, hawks, ground hornbills, and 
flocks of beautiful egrets and cow herons, which stalked 
sedately through the grass, and now and then turned 
a small tree nearly white by all perching in it. The 
little bank-swallows came in myriads—exactly the same, 
by the way, as our familiar home friends, for the bank- 
swallow is the most widely distributed of all birds. The 
most conspicuous attendants of the fires, however, were 
the bee-eaters, the largest and handsomest we had yet 
seen, their plumage every shade of blended red and rose 
