268 
SAVAGE SUDAN 
exist water-beetles as big - as some rabbits I’ve seen! 
There are also water-pythons, water-turtles as big as a 
cart-wheel, and monitor lizards 6 feet long. All these 
one sees occasionally ; but there is also evidence of things 
not seen—some of them monsters, as testified by great 
wandering “waves” moving along without a visible cause. 
I find the following 
note in my diary :—-“It 
seems clear that if any 
human amphibian is pre¬ 
pared to devote several 
months to the investiga¬ 
tion of this ghastly 
Sudd, the result would 
probably ensue that the 
existence of several un¬ 
known species of rails, 
gallinules, porphyrios, 
and marsh - warblers 
might be revealed to 
science. Personally I 
am not on it.” 
The great whale¬ 
headed stork {Balczniceps 
rex) ought not to be 
passed over in silence, 
though we saw little or 
Whale-headed Stork (Balamiceps rex), nothing of it, its narrow 
from life. being Qn the 
Bahr-el-Ghazal, a trifle to the west of our hunting-grounds. 1 
But we did meet here with a new acquaintance of the 
stork-persuasion, never at this season seen north of the 
Sudd—to wit, “ Abdim’s stork,” a creature with thunder- 
and-lightning mandibles not unlike a minor jabiru. These 
1 I have, nevertheless, a note of a Balaeniceps shot on Lake Kioga, on 
the Victoria Nile in Uganda, about ij° North latitude. This is about seven 
or eight degrees south of the normally accepted range of its species. 
