I could not make out what was the matter, and in my usual impetuous way, I blurted out, plump and plain, the question that was uppermost in my mind.
"Is there anything wrong with the chickens?"
This was too much for their gravity. Both the baron and Schomburgk burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter, and the former ran to fetch his diary.
"Look here," he said, pointing to one of the last entries, "I have already, during the years I have spent in this benighted country, eaten 9863 chickens. Schomburgk has probably eaten pro rata at least as many"—the major nodded—"and now you give us two more as a treat! O Lord!"
I joined in their laughter then. I had to. And, after all, my little dinner passed off excellently well, for of course there were other dishes. Meanwhile I had learnt one more African lesson. Never, never, NEVER offer your guests chicken if there is anything else under the sun obtainable by hook or by crook. Cheese and crackers, if you like; or tinned salmon, or sardines, or even "bully" beef. But the domestic fowl, regarded as more or less of a luxury in Europe, is in Africa absolutely tabu. It is the one article of flesh diet that is all-pervading everywhere out there, and which everybody consequently soon heartily sickens of. As well might one offer a dish of salmon to an Alaskan fisherman; or a ragout of mutton to an Australian boundary rider.
Another lesson I learnt during my long and wearisome illness was never to kill a lizard, the reason being that lizards eat insects, and insects of innumerable and most diverse kinds constitute the principal pests of equatorial Africa. The houses out there swarm with lizards, and they are big ones too, fully eighteen inches or more in length. Nobody dreams of interfering with them. On the contrary, they are everywhere petted and made much of. One old fellow I got quite attached to, and he to me. I always knew him from the others because he had only three legs, having lost the other, probably in an encounter with one of his kind. He was as good as a watch. I used to call him my tea-time lizard, because he always put in an appearance precisely at four o'clock every afternoon.
Schomburgk used to tell me that every lizard was responsible for killing and eating I don't know how many hundreds—or was it thousands?—of white ants daily. Very likely. But all the same the ants did not seem to me to diminish perceptibly. The venomous and vicious little pests swarmed everywhere in incredible numbers. Nothing seemed to come amiss to them. Our operator declared that he once found a lot of them trying to make a meal off a sixteen-pound cannon-ball that he used as a make-weight to the tripod of his machine to prevent it being blown or knocked over, but this I altogether decline to believe. He must have been—well, mistaken. But I can vouch from bitter personal experience that they will devour, in the course of a single night, photographs hung on the walls, and boots left standing on the floor; and once a detachment of them riddled so badly a strong wooden box in which I kept my letters and papers that it fell to pieces in my hands.
Another troublesome insect pest was a kind of big wood-boring beetle, that made its home chiefly in the beams of the roof. These he would riddle so completely that sooner or later the thatch was practically certain to come tumbling about one's ears. While in between whiles he peppered the interior with sawdust from his carpentering operations to such an extent that I was kept continually busy dusting and sweeping it out.
Later, however, when we trekked further up-country right into the real heart of the unexplored hinterland, I learnt that Africa held other even worse insect pests than white ants and wood-boring beetles. But of these more anon.