Of course our friend Homer, the grand old bard that will never die, did not see the Dwarfs, and only related what he had heard of them, and, like every thing that is transmitted from mouth to mouth, and from country to country, the story has become very much exaggerated.
Beyond a doubt, at certain seasons of every year the cranes left the country of which Homer spoke, for cranes are migratory, and their migration was toward the Nile; thence they winged their flight toward the Upper Nile, and spread all over the interior of Africa; and, as they came to the country of the Dwarfs, the Dwarfs came out to kill them, instead of their coming to kill the Dwarfs. The dwarfs of Homer's time killed them for food, as they still kill them in Equatorial Africa in certain seasons of the year.
I am now going to tell you what I wrote about these big cranes before I had even heard of the Country of the Dwarfs, or that such people as the Obongos ever existed:
"This account of Homer has been thought fabulous; for 'How,' it has been asked, 'could cranes attack a race of men?'
"Where were these pigmies to exist? I will try to show that Homer had some reason to say what he wrote. In the first book which I published (called 'Explorations in Equatorial Africa') I did not mention what Homer had written. I had heard of the Dwarfs, but I dismissed the account given to me by the Apingi as fabulous. In chap. xiv., p. 260, I say:
"'The dry season was now setting in in earnest, and I devoted the whole month of July to exploring the country along the sea-shore. It is curious that most of the birds which were so abundant during the rainy season had by this time taken their leave, and other birds in immense numbers flocked in to feed on the fish, which now leave the sea-shore and bars of the river mouth, and ascend the river to spawn.'
"In the four paragraphs in advance on the same page I said, 'Birds flocked in immense numbers on the prairies, whither they came to hatch their young.
"'The ugly marabouts, from whose tails our ladies get the splendid feathers for their bonnets, were there in thousands. Pelicans waded on the river's banks all day in prodigious swarms, gulping down the luckless fish which came in their way.'
"In the next paragraph, page 261, I continue: