"Did I hit it, sir?" he asked eagerly.
"It is impossible to say. It may merely have been startled by the report, and we could only make sure by waiting to see if its body rises."
"And that, of course, we can't do," said Tom with a sigh.
The launch sped on and on, steaming now her full seven knots. Tom noticed that she was never very far from the land, and knowing, from his look at the map overnight, that Bukumbi was almost in the centre of the southern shore, he wondered why the padre did not steer a more westerly course. He asked the question.
"Well," said the missionary, "it is partly custom and partly superstition, I suspect. Everyone is shy of sailing directly across from north to south or east to west. Many of our launches are hardly tight craft, as you see, and a storm would be a very serious matter in the open."
"But surely there are no storms on an inland lake?"
"There are indeed. The wind here sometimes lashes the water into waves as high as any you can see on the English Channel. Gales have blown the native dhows out into the open, and they have never returned. The natives, too, will tell you that a huge monster inhabits the waters near one of the many islands that stud the lake; there it lies in wait to suck their craft down. I have never seen it myself," he added with a smile, "but I once heard your Sir Harry Johnston say that he had looked into the matter, and was rather inclined to believe that the monster was a manatee."
Still they sailed on. After sixty miles or so they left British territory and came into German East Africa, and soon the tropical forest which had clothed the highlands sloping back from the shore, gave place to more level grassland, some of which was evidently under cultivation. The shore was indented in many narrow creeks, and in one of these Tom saw a singular-looking canoe, at least fifty feet long, manned by a dozen naked Baganda. The keel of this, the padre told him, was a single tree-stem, the interior of which had been chipped out with axes and burnt out with fire. When the keel was finished, holes were bored in it at intervals with a red-hot iron spike; the planks for the sides were similarly pierced; and then wattles made of the rind of the raphia palm were passed through the holes, and planks and keel were literally sewn together. All chinks and holes were then stopped with grease, and the whole canoe, inside and out, was smeared with a coating of vermilion-coloured clay. The prow projected some feet beyond the nose of the boat, and sloped upwards from the water. The top of it, Tom observed, was decorated with a pair of horns, and connected with the beak by a rope from which hung a fringe of grass and filaments from the banana-tree. When the occupants of the canoe caught sight of the White Father, they struck their paddles into the water, and drove their slender craft rapidly towards the launch. But the padre made signs that he was in a great hurry and could not stop to speak to them, and after a time they desisted and paddled back to the shore.
"Though I believe they could have overtaken us if they chose," said the missionary. "I have known them propel their canoes at six or seven miles an hour."
"Mr. Barkworth would call them fine fellows," remarked Tom with a smile. "I always had an idea that the natives of these parts were a puny, stunted set of people, but really those fellows in the canoe are splendid specimens."