WHAT THE COUNTRY LOOKS LIKE 27 
scarcely perceptible ; against the green background of the marsh they look like 
a vast fringe of pale pink azaleas in full blossom. 
Small bronze-green cormorants are plunging into the water for fish, diving 
and swimming under water, and flying away. Fish-catching on a more modest 
scale and quite close to where we stand is being carried on by black and white 
Ceryle kingfishers, who with their bodies nearly erect and the head and beak 
directed downwards will poise themselves in the air with rapidly fluttering wings 
and then dart unerringly head foremost on some tiny fish under the surface of 
the water. 
On the sandspit two dainty crowned cranes are pacing the sand and the 
scattered wiry grass looking for locusts. Even at this distance—and especially 
if you use a glass—you can distinguish the details of their coloration. It 
will be seen that they have a short, finely-shaped beak of slatey black, a 
large eye of bluish grey, surrounded by a black ring; and the cheeks covered 
with bare porcelain-like skin, pure white, which is much enhanced by an 
edging of crimson developing below the throat into two bright crimson 
wattles. The head is fitly crowned with a large aigrette of golden filaments, 
tipped with black. The neck with its long hackles is dove grey. The back 
and the breast are slate colour, the mass of the wing is snow white, and its 
huge broadened pinions are reddish chocolate, the white secondaries being 
prolonged into a beautiful golden fringe hanging gracefully over the chocolate 
quill feathers. 
The quacking of the ducks, the loud cries of the geese and the compound 
sound of splashings and divings and scuttering flights across the water, are 
dominated from time to time by the ear-piercing screams of a fish eagle, 
perched on one of the taller poles of a fishing weir. The bird is as full of 
fish as he can hold, but yet seems annoyed at the guzzling that is going on 
around him, and so relieves his feelings at odd moments by piercing yells. He 
is a handsome bird—head and neck and breast snow white, the rest of the 
plumage chocolate brown. 
Add to the foregoing enumeration of birds stilt plovers of black and white ; 
spur-winged plovers with yellow wattles ; curlew ; sandpipers ; crimson-beaked 
pratincoles; sacred ibis (pure white and indigo-purple); hagedash ibis (irides¬ 
cent-blue, green, and red-bronze) ; gallinules (verditer blue with red beaks); 
black water-rails with lemon beaks and white pencillings; black coots; other 
rails that are blue and green with turned-up white tails ; squacco herons (white 
and fawn-coloured); large grey herons ; purple-slate-coloured herons ; bluish- 
gray egrets ; white egrets ; large egrets with feathery plumes ; small egrets with 
snowy bodies and yellow beaks ; Goliath herons (nut-brown and pinkish-grey); 
small black storks, with open and serrated beaks; monstrous bare-headed 
marabu storks; and dainty lily-trotters 1 (black and white, golden-yellow and 
chocolate-brown); and you will still only have got half way through the 
enumeration of this extraordinary congregation of water birds at the estuary 
of the river Lofu, on the south coast of Tanganyika. 
Civilisation.-—We are going to spend a Sunday at Blant'yre, a European 
settlement in the Shire Highlands. Except for the name, however, there is no 
similarity between the little manufacturing town, which was Livingstone’s birth¬ 
place, and the chief focus of European interests here in South Central Africa. 
These are the characteristics of the African Blantyre on a bright Sunday 
1 Parra Africana. 
