"Can I help you?" Roger asked. "It's hypodermic, isn't it?"
"Would you mind? You shove the snout of the thing into my arm, and push the spirit. It won't take a minute." He shewed Roger into a Spartan bedroom, furnished with a camp-bed and a Sandow's exerciser.
"Now," he said, producing a bottle and a syringe, "first I'll roll up my sleeve, and then I'll shew you how to sterilise the needle. I suppose you've never done this kind of thing before? Now, jab it in just here where all the punctures are."
"You said it was your last dose," said Roger. "Does that mean that you are cured?"
"Cured for the time. I may get a relapse. Still, that isn't likely."
"How do you know that you are cured? Do you feel better?"
"I don't get insomnia," said Lionel. "No. They inject bits of me into a monkey, and then wait to see if the monkey develops the organism. The monkey's very fit indeed, so they reckon that I'm cured. Thanks. That'll do. Now I hear tea coming. Go on in, will you? I'll be out in a minute. I must get out my slides."
After, tea they looked at relics, to wit, tsetse-flies, butterflies, biting flies, fragments of the same, sections of them, slides of trypanosomes, slides of filaria, slides of Laverania. "I've got these photographs, too," said Lionel. "They aren't very good; but they give you an idea of the place. This lot are all rather dark. I suppose they were over-exposed. They shew you the sort of places the tsetse likes. The hut in this one is a native hut. I lived in it while I was out there the last time. I was studying the tsetse's ways."
"They're always near water, aren't they?" Roger asked.
"Yes, generally near water. They keep to a narrow strip of cover by the side of a lake or stream. They don't like to go very far from water unless they are pursuing a victim. In fact, you're perfectly safe if you avoid fly-country. If you go into fly-country, of course they come for you. They'll hunt you for some way when you leave it. They like a shady water with a little sandy shady beach at the side. They like sand or loose soil better than mud. Mud breeds sedge, which they don't care about. They like a sort of scrubby jungle. One or two trees attract them especially. Here's a tree where about a dozen natives got it together merely from taking their siesta there."