Thirdly, a small party would make too much noise in breaking of twigs, in treading upon crisp leaves, in brushing against bush, or in cutting a vine or a creeper to make headway. A wild animal is warned long before the hunters know that it is near them, and bounds away to distant coverts. We have suddenly come across elephants, but when they were within ten yards of us they have crashed their way through a jungle that was impervious to pursuers. As for buffalo and other game, their tracks were very common, but it would have been madness to have pursued them for the above three reasons alone.
Fourthly, we had too serious an object in view, which was to discover food and where we were most likely to get it—not for a small party, but for all.
As for birds, they made clatter enough overhead, but we were in the basement, and they were on the roof of a fifteen-storey house. They could not be seen at all, though their whistlings, warblings, screamings, and hootings were heard everywhere. There were parrots, ibis, touracos, parraquets, sunbirds, swifts, finches, shrikes, whip-poor-wills, hoopoes, owls, guinea fowl, blackbirds, weavers, kingfishers, divers, fish eagles, kites, wagtails, bee-eaters, pipits, sandpipers, cockatoos, hornbills, jays, barbets, woodpeckers, pigeons, and unknown minute tribes, and millions of large and small bats.
The Simian tribe was well represented. I have caught sight of more than a dozen species. I have seen the colobus, dark and grey furred baboons, small black monkeys, galagos and flying squirrels, and others, but not nearer than a hundred yards. Long before we could reach them they had been alarmed by the murmur of the caravan, and commenced the retreat.
We came across a number of reptiles. The Ituri swarms with water snakes of various lengths. They continued to drop frequently very close to our boat, slender green whip-snakes, others lead colour of formidable size; others green, gold and black, six feet long. We saw pythons, puff adders, horned and fanged snakes, while small bush snakes about two feet long often fell victims during the preparation of camps.
Insects would require a whole book. Never have I seen such countless armies and species as during my various marches through this forest. I should consider it infra dig. to refer to those minute creatures after the lavish abuses I, in common with others of the Expedition, have bestowed on them. I recollect but few hours of daylight that I did not express myself unkindly towards them. Those bees, large and small, the wasps, the hordes of moths by night, the house-flies, tsetse, gadflies, gnats, and butterflies by day, the giant beetles, attracted by the light in the tent, sailing through the darkness, and dashing frantically against the canvas, rebounding in their rage from side to side, and all the time hoarsely booming, finally with roars of fury dashing themselves against my book or face, as though they would wreak vengeance on me for some reason; then the swarms of ants peering into my plate, intruding into my washy soup, crawling over my bananas, the crickets that sprang like demons, and fixed themselves in my scalp, or on my forehead; the shrill cicadæ that drove one mad, worse than the peppo-inspired Manyuema women. The Pasha professes to love these tribes, and I confess I have done as much mischief to them as possible.
The small bees of the size of gnats were the most tormenting of all the species; we became acquainted with four. They are of the Mellipona. To read, write, or eat required the devoted services of an attendant to drive them away. The eyes were their favourite points of attack; but the ears and nostrils also were sensitive objects to which they invariably reverted. The donkeys’ legs were stripped bare of hair, because of these pests. The death of one left an odour of bitter almonds on the hand.
The beetles, again, varied from the size of a monstrous two-and-a-half inches in length to an insect that would have bored through the eye of a tailor’s needle. This last when examined through a magnifying glass seemed to be efficiently equipped for troubling humanity. It burrowed into the skin. It could not be discovered by the eyes unless attention was directed by giving a cross rub with the hand, when a pain like the prick of a pin was felt. The natives’ huts were infested with three peculiar species. One burrowed into one’s body, another bored into the rafters and dropped fine sawdust into the soup, another explored among the crisp leaves of the roof and gave one a creeping fear that there were snakes about; a fourth, which was a roaring lion of a beetle, waited until night and then made it impossible to keep a candle lit for a quiet pipe and meditation.
1888.
Dec.
Forest.
Among the minor unpleasantnesses which we had to endure we may mention the “jigger,” which deposited its eggs under the toenails of the most active men, but which attacked the body of a “goee-goee” and made him a mass of living corruption; the little beetle that dived underneath the skin and pricked one as with a needle; the mellipona bee, that troubled the eyes, and made one almost frantic some days; the small and large ticks that insidiously sucked one’s small store of blood; the wasps, which stung one into a raging fever if some careless idiot touched the tree, or shouted near their haunts; the wild honey-bees, which one day scattered two canoe crews, and punished them so that we had to send a detachment of men to rescue them; the tiger-slug, that dropped from the branches and left his poisonous fur in the pores of the body until one raved from the pain; the red ants, that invaded the camp by night and disturbed our sleep, and attacked the caravan half a score of times on the march, and made the men run faster than if pursued by so many pigmies; the black ants, which infested the trumpet tree, and dropped on us when passing underneath, and gave us all a foretaste of the Inferno; the small ants that invaded every particle of food, which required great care lest we might swallow half a dozen inadvertently, and have the stomach membranes perforated or blistered—small as they were, they were the most troublesome, for in every tunnel made through the bush thousands of them housed themselves upon us, and so bit and stung us that I have seen the pioneers covered with blisters as from nettles; and, of course, there were our old friends the mosquitos in numbers in the greater clearings.