ch. xiti] CONGO TRADERS 877 
doors of the room in which the big presents are arranged, 
those for each child on a separate table. 
Forty miles from the coast the elephant-grass began 
to disappear. The hills became somewhat higher ; there 
were thorn-trees and stately royal palms of great height, 
their stems swollen and bulging at the top, near the 
fronds. Parasitic ferns, with leaves as large as cabbage 
leaves, grew on the branches of the acacias. One kind 
of tree sent down from its branches to the ground roots 
which grew into thick trunks. There were wide, 
shallow marshes, and although the grass was tall, it 
was no longer above a man’s head. Kermit and I 
usually got two or three hours’ hunting each day. We 
killed singsing, waterbuck, bush buck, and bohor reed- 
buck. The reedbuck differed slightly from those of 
East Africa ; in places they were plentiful, and they 
were not wary. We also killed several hartebeests— a 
variety of the Jackson’s hartebeest, being more highly 
coloured, with black markings. I killed a very hand¬ 
some harnessed bushbuck ram. It was rather bigger 
than a good-sized white-tail buck, its brilliant red coat 
beautifully marked with rows of white spots, its twisted 
black horns sharp and polished. It seemed to stand 
about halfway between the dark-coloured bushbuck 
rams of East and South Africa and the beautifully 
marked harnessed antelope rams of the West Coast 
forests. The ewes and young rams showed the harness 
markings even more plainly, and, as with all bushbuck, 
were of small size compared to the old rams. These 
bushbuck were found in tall grass, where the ground 
was wet, instead of in the thick bush where their East 
African kinsfolk spend the daytime. 
At the bushbuck camp we met a number of porters 
returning from the Congo, where they had been with an 
