388 
A BRAVE GERMAN AMONG THE CANNIBALS 
big sheet he enveloped himself in it, and under its shelter had to set to 
work one by one to crush the bees enclosed with him beneath it. At 
last, after three hours, the buzzing subsided, and the men setting fire 
to the reeds on the bank induced these insect plagues to shift thefr 
quarters. One of the traveler’s dogs had been stung to death; and as 
for himself, though with pincers he was able to remove the stings from 
his face, those beneath his hair produced small ulcers which were 
.'painfuk for several days. 
Passing up the White Nile through the country of the Shillooks, 
and reaching the mouth of the river Sobat, Schweinfurth there made a 
very fortunate acquaintance in the person of Mohammed Aboo 
Sammatt, an influential ivory merchant, who offered to accompany him 
into the interior, and in the event, from first to last, proved a most 
valuable companion and friend. On arriving at the confluence of the 
Bahr-el-Ghazal with the White Nile, great annoyance and delay was 
caused by those masses of vegetation blocking up the river which 
Baker had previously met with. 
“Two hundred of our people,” he says, “sailors and soldiers, were 
obliged to lug with ropes for hours together to pull through one boat 
after the other, while they walked along the edge of the floating mass, 
which would bear whole herds of oxen, as I subsequently had an oppor¬ 
tunity of seeing.” 
On March 25th, joining several other caravans that were starting 
for the interior, Schweinfurth and his men, leaving the river, started 
on their inland journey to the west, traveling through the countries of 
the Dyoor, Dinka and Bongo tribes. One great nuisance on the way 
was the tremendous noise which the Nubians of the caravan would 
constantly make at night. When tipsy with their national drink, 
i“merissa,” they banged for hours together the kettledrums which hung 
at the entrance of the seriba, or village. After vain remonstrances, 
Schweinfurth took the liberty of sprinkling the parchment of these 
huge drums with muriatic acid, so that the next time they were 
drummed upon they split across, and thus, for a time at least, he 
obtained peace. 
After an excursion into the Mittoo country, where, as everywhere, 
he collected abundant fresh botanical and zoological specimens, prepa- 
