I should like to give a picture of the animal life still extant along the banks of the Pangani. The time is inevitably approaching when that, too, will be a thing of the past, for it is not to be supposed that advancing civilisation will prove less destructive here.
So recently as the year 1896 the course of the river was for the most part unknown. When I followed it for the second time in 1897, and when in subsequent years I explored both its banks for great distances, people were still so much in the dark about it that several expeditions were sent out to discover whether it was navigable.
That it was not navigable I myself had long known. Its numerous rapids are impracticable for boats even in the rainy season. In the dry season they present insuperable obstacles to navigation of any kind.
C. G. Schillings, phot.
A FISHERMAN’S BAG! THREE CROCODILES SECURED BY THE AUTHOR IN THE WAY DESCRIBED IN “WITH FLASHLIGHT AND RIFLE.”
The basin of the Djipe Lake in the upper reaches of the Pangani, and the Pangani swamps below its lower reaches, formed a kind of natural preserve for every variety of the marvellous fauna of East Africa. It was a veritable El Dorado for the European sportsman, but one attended by all kinds of perils and difficulties. The explorer found manifold compensation, however, for everything in the unexampled opportunities afforded him for the study of wild life in the midst of these stifling marshes and lagoons. The experience of listening night after night to the myriad voices of the wilderness is beyond description.
Hippopotami were extraordinarily numerous at one time in the comparatively small basin of the Djipe Lake. In all my long sojourn by the banks of the Pangani I only killed two, and I never again went after any. There were such numbers, however, round Djipe Lake ten years ago that you often saw dozens of them together at one time. I fear that by now they have been nearly exterminated.
Here, as everywhere else, the natives have levied but a small tribute upon the numbers of the wild animals, a tribute in keeping with the nature of their primitive weapons. Elephants used regularly to make their way down to the water-side from the Kilimanjaro woods. My old friend Nguruman, the Ndorobo chieftain, used to lie in wait for them, with his followers, concealed in the dense woods along the river. But the time came when the elephants ceased to make their appearance. The old hunter, whose body bore signs of many an encounter with lions as well as elephants, and who used often to hold forth to me beside camp fires on the subject of these adventures, could not make out why his eagerly coveted quarry had become so scarce. Every other species of “big game” was well represented, however, and according to the time of the year I enjoyed ever fresh opportunities for observation. Generally speaking, it would be a case of watching one aspect of wild life one day and another all the next, but now and again my eyes and ears would be surfeited and bewildered by its manifestations. The sketch-plans on which I used to record my day’s doings and seeings serve now to recall to me all the multiform experiences that fell to my lot. What a pity it is that the old explorers of South Africa have left no such memoranda behind them for our benefit! They would enable us to form a better idea of things than we can derive from any kind of pictures or descriptions.