After we had breakfasted we made our simple preparations for resuming the march, but to our dismay we found that the mules had disappeared. The man in charge of them while they were grazing had carelessly let them wander, and they were not to be found. We eventually discovered their tracks leading back over the path we had traversed in the morning, and we immediately sent some of the men in chase. They returned in an hour with the refractory animals, and we set off once more on our journey down the river. We saw immense herds of game on the road, including giraffe, buffalo, rhinoceros, grantei, and water-buck, and now and again we passed old elephant and lion tracks.
To the south and east the shining desert extended away to the horizon, with only a few thorny acacias to relieve the general appearance of sameness. Troops of baboons squatted on the sand or skipped about like children at play, their hoarse barks being interpreted by our little puppy as a challenge, which, however, he wisely declined to accept. At sundown we camped under a clump of palms, and turned in early, thoroughly tired out. For myself, during the whole of our journey to Lorian and back, I slept in paragraphs, so to speak, waking at intervals all through the night, a result contributed to in no small degree by the up-and-down-the-scale-two-octaves bird I have already mentioned.
The following day we were on our way again at sunrise. An hour afterwards we entered the most desolate region it had so far been our ill luck to traverse. Trees and palms disappeared, and their place was taken by coarse dry elephant grass eight or ten feet in height. The country bore unmistakable signs of having been under water not so very many seasons before. It was pitted in every direction by elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus tracks, which must have been made when the earth was very soft, as they averaged from a foot to eighteen inches in depth. These caused us great inconvenience, as, being hidden by the long grass, we stumbled in and out of them in a most unpleasant way, jarring our teeth and our tempers with great frequency. In our endeavours to find some sort of a path we lost the river, leaving it as we thought on our extreme left, and in searching for it, to our intense surprise, we walked nearly into it. It was flowing between perfectly perpendicular banks about six feet in height, and in a direction at right angles to its course at the commencement of the morning’s march. It was now little more than a large ditch, and required to be followed very carefully, as there were no trees on the banks to mark its position. This immense dried swamp is called by Mr. Chanler the Kirrimar Plain. Personally I am of opinion that in wet seasons, or after a series of wet seasons, that portion of it immediately adjoining the river forms part of a swamp or chain of swamps, to which the name Lorian is given. My reasons for this supposition are given in the next chapter.
We followed the river very carefully, as, in the event of its taking a sudden curve, we should have been absolutely lost, and in that case must inevitably have perished. Indeed, the men were already very frightened, and grumbled openly. They declared that we had got to the end of the world, and had much better turn back before worse befell us. The presence of numbers of rhinoceros had very much frightened them. We encountered over thirty of them on one march; and quite half a dozen times had to warily circumnavigate some ungainly member of the species who was grazing directly in our path. We paid no attention to this display of insubordination on the part of the men, but pushed on, every obstacle to our progress only serving to encourage us still more to persevere in our effort to reach the much-desired goal. The heat on this open plain was tremendous; it must have been above 120° Fahr. We were only a matter of about 800 feet above sea-level, and consequently encountered the full force of the vertical rays of the equatorial sun.
At midday we halted, and, creeping under a bush for shelter, ate our frugal meal of broiled meat, lying at full length on the ground. During the meal a whisper of “ungruwe” (pig) from Ramathani brought El Hakim to his feet. Seizing his rifle, he stepped outside and shot an old boar, who, with two or three sows, was quietly feeding about fifty yards away, utterly oblivious of our presence. His flesh was tough and tasteless, not in the least resembling pork.
Several of the men came to us during the halt, to inquire how much further we were going, as they thought that we had got into the country of the “Afreets” (devils), and it would be advisable to go no further. We assured them that two or three days at most would see us at the end of our journey. The country looked so desolate and barren that I do not wonder its appearance worked on the superstitious minds of our men. We laughed at them, but they were only half reassured. We started again, and continued to follow the river, which was now not more than ten yards wide. Large crocodiles swarmed on every mud-bank, some of them immense brutes, even El Hakim declaring that he had never seen larger. One ugly reptile which started up and plunged into the water at our approach, must have been fully twenty feet long or more. El Hakim appropriately called him “the father of all crocodiles.” This loathsome reptile, with its blunt and massive snout and immense scaly body, reminded me of the “Mugger” of the ford, in one of Kipling’s stories. The largest crocodiles were dark-brown in colour, but there were multitudes of smaller ones, some bright green and others bright yellow, two of which I shot during the afternoon. When we camped that evening we built huge fires between ourselves and the water, in order to prevent the possibility of any of our party being seized during the night by the hideous reptiles.
The following day was merely a repetition of the previous one. We advanced through the same dried-up swamp, with its innumerable pits, hidden by the same coarse grass and reeds. If anything, the landscape seemed to have acquired an added tinge of desolation. Rhino were a drug in the market, owing to the increased supply, but zebra and grantei stock advanced several points during the day. We followed the river very closely, not only because it was our only guide, but because the hippopotamus, which abound in this portion of the Waso Nyiro, had, in wandering from pool to pool, trodden a rough path on the crest of the perpendicular bank of the river, which made walking much easier than if we had forced our way across the plain in endeavouring to cut across curves in the river-bed, though it necessitated a longer walk. This path was also a favourite sleeping-place for wandering rhinoceros, and on several occasions we walked almost on to them, as they were hidden by the tall grass. A shout generally brought the sleeping brute to his feet with a snort and a stamp, and he would scurry away over the plain the picture of indignant reproach.
During the march a slight misunderstanding between El Hakim and myself came very near to landing us both in an extremely perilous position. One rhino we came up with did not wake so easily, and as he lay right across the path, we had to shift him by some means. Standing fifteen or twenty yards away, we shouted, but he did not move; so El Hakim stole softly up to within three or four yards of him, and, stooping, he broke off clods of earth from the edge of the river-bank and threw them at the sleeping beast, just as a small boy might chivvy a cat with stones. Even that did not move him, so I stole softly up to El Hakim with his ·577, which I handed to him. Instead of taking it, he seized my small-bore rifle, and I, thinking he meant me to try my luck with his, proceeded to cock it; but while I was doing so El Hakim let drive at the brute’s head with my rifle. If he had warned me of his intention, I should have told him that my ·303 shot very high at short range, but he fired before I could do so, and missed its brain altogether, only drilling a clean hole through the ear. Up jumped the rhino and faced us. I waited for El Hakim to fire again, while he, it afterwards appeared, waited for me to put in a shot with the heavier weapon. The rhino, meanwhile, made a rush at us, and we were both prepared to slip over the bank into the river and chance the crocodiles, when the brute changed its mind, and, swerving aside, galloped away across the plain. Mutual explanations ensued, and we proceeded on our momentarily interrupted journey. In cold print it would seem as if we had both betrayed some indecision, but the reader must bear in mind the fact that from the time El Hakim fired the shot from my ·303 to the time the rhino swerved and galloped away, an observer could not have counted more than four or five seconds.
The river still diminished very much in volume, as a large amount of water must of necessity be absorbed by the surrounding dry country, while the loss by evaporation must be enormous. According to our calculations we should now have been almost in sight of Lorian, having travelled quite sixty-five miles down the river from our Rendili camp.
On reaching a pool situated in a bend of the river, we came upon a school of hippopotamus wallowing in the mud at the water’s edge. We hid ourselves on the bank about ten yards away, and watched them for some time, as one very rarely has a chance of seeing them, unobserved, at such close quarters. Presently one of them rose, and, climbing the bank, walked slowly towards us, grazing as it came. El Hakim sat down—his favourite position for a shot—and dropped it dead with a bullet through the neck. At the sound of the report a terrific splash from the pool announced the alarm of the other members of the school, and with one accord they dived to the bottom, whence they reappeared at intervals to breathe, accompanied by much blowing and snorting. With shouts of joy our men instantly pounced upon the fallen hippopotamus, its meat being greatly esteemed by them as food. We also were badly in need of fat, which the dead animal supplied in great abundance. On cutting it open we found layers of rich yellow fat, a couple of inches thick, between the skin and the body. Great fires were at once lit, and for the next hour or two the spot resembled the deck of a whaler when the blubber is being boiled down. The men got a plentiful supply of fat for themselves, and, after an hour’s boiling and rendering, we also obtained two buckets of rich fat congealed to the consistency of butter, which it resembled in colour.