364 
UGANDA 
[CH. XIII 
forbidding beauty. Dark clouds hung over the land 
we had left, and a rainbow stretched across their front. 
At nightfall, as the red sunset faded, the lonely waters 
of the vast inland sea stretched, ocean-like, west and 
south into a shoreless gloom. Then the darkness 
deepened, the tropic stars blazed overhead, and the 
light of the half-moon drowned in silver the embers 
of the sunset. 
Next morning we steamed along and across the 
Equator—the last time we were to cross it, for thence¬ 
forth our course lay northward. We passed by many 
islands, green with meadow and forest, beautiful in the 
bright sunshine, but empty with the emptiness of death. A 
decade previously these islands were thronged with tribes 
of fisher-folk ; their villages studded the shores, and their 
long canoes, planks held together with fibre, furrowed 
the surface of the lake. Then, from out of the depths 
of the Congo forest came the dreadful scourge of the 
sleeping sickness, and smote the doomed peoples who 
dwelt beside the Victorian Nile, and on the coasts of 
the Nyanza Lakes, and in the lands between. Its agent 
was a biting fly, brother to the tsetse, whose bite is fatal 
to domestic animals. This fly dwells in forests, beside 
lakes and rivers ; and wherever it dwells, after the 
sleeping sickness came, it was found that man could not 
live. In this country, between and along the shores of 
the great lakes, two hundred thousand people died in 
slow torment before the hard-taxed wisdom and skill 
of medical science and governmental administration 
could work any betterment whatever in the situation. 
Men still die by thousands, and the disease is slowly 
spreading into fresh districts. But it has proved possible 
to keep it within limits in the regions already affected ; 
yet only by absolutely abandoning certain districts, and 
