African Game Trails 
151 
hour. The natives looked well and were 
dressed well; the men in long flowing gar¬ 
ments of white, the women usually in 
brown cloth made in the old native style 
out of the bark of the bark cloth tree. 
The clothes of the chiefs were tastefully 
ornamented. All the people, gentle and 
simple, were very polite and ceremonious 
both to one another and to strangers. 
Now and then we met parties of Sikh 
soldiers, tall, bearded, fine-looking men 
a riot of lush growing plants. Every day 
there were terrific thunder-storms. At 
Kampalla three men had been killed by 
lightning within six weeks; a year or two 
before our host, Knowles, had been struck 
by lightning and knocked senseless, a huge 
zigzag mark being left across his body, and 
the links of his gold watch chain being 
fused; it was many months before he com¬ 
pletely recovered. 
Knowles arranged a situtunga hunt for 
Cow herons and Angola ox on the bank of Lake Victoria Nyanza. 
with turbans; and there were Indian 
and Swahili and even Arab and Persian 
traders. 
The houses had mud walls and thatched 
roofs. The gardens were surrounded by 
braided cane fences. In the gardens and 
along the streets were many trees; among 
them bark cloth trees, from which the bark 
is stripped every year for cloth; great in¬ 
cense trees, the sweet-scented gum oozing 
through wounds in the bark; and date 
palms, in the fronds of which hung the nests 
of the golden weaver birds, now breeding. 
White cow herons, tamer than barnyard 
fowls, accompanied the cattle, perching on 
their backs, or walking beside them. Beau¬ 
tiful Kavirondo cranes came familiarly 
round the houses. It was all strange and 
attractive. Birds sang everywhere. The 
air was heavy with the fragrance of flow¬ 
ers of many colors; the whole place was 
us. The situtunga is closely related to the 
bushbuck but is bigger, with very long 
hoofs, and shaggy hair like a waterbuck. 
It is exclusively a beast of the marshes, 
making its home in the thick reed beds, 
where the water is deep; and it is exceed¬ 
ingly shy, so that very few white men have 
shot, or even seen, it. Its long hoofs en¬ 
able it to go over the most treacherous 
ground, and it swims well; in many of its 
haunts, in the thick papyrus, the water is 
waist deep on a man. Through the papy¬ 
rus, and the reeds and marsh grass, it 
makes well-beaten paths. Where it is in 
any danger of molestation it is never seen 
abroad in the daytime, venturing from the 
safe cover of the high reeds only at night; 
but fifty miles inland, in the marsh grass 
on the edge of a big papyrus swamp, Ker- 
mit caught a glimpse of half a dozen feeding 
in the open, kneedeep in water, long after 
