The herd no longer rises; the beasts fear this hulking craft. We must try some other plan. My companion, accompanied by Bombay, who strips to paddle, in token of warm work expected, shifts to a small canoe, lashes fast his shooting tackle to the seat, in case of an upset, and whilst I occupy one end of the ‘house,’ makes for the other. Whenever a head appears an inch above water, a heavy bullet ‘puds’ into or near it; crimson patches marble the stream; some die and disappear, others plunge in crippled state; while others, disabled from diving by holes drilled through their snouts, splash and scurry about with curious snorts, caused by the breath passing through the wounds. At last the small canoe ventures upon another experiment. A baby hippo., with the naïveté natural to his age, uprears his crest, doubtless despite the maternal warning: off flies the crown of the little kid’s head. The bereaved mother rises for an instant, viciously regards the infanticide, who is quietly loading, snorts a parent’s curse, and dives as the cap is being adjusted. Presently a bump, a shock, and a heave, and the bows of the barque are high in the air. Bombay, describing a small parabola, lands in frog-position upon the enraged brute’s back. My companion steadies himself in the stern; happily the Kiboko had not struck out with the forearm, nor torn off the gunwale with her mighty jaws: he sends a ball through her sides as, with broad dorsum hunched up and hogged, like an angry cat, she advances for a second bout. Bombay scrambles into the monoxyle, and nothing daunted, paddles towards the quarry, which funks and bolts till nothing is visible but a long, waving line of gore. With a harpoon we might have secured it; now it will feed, with ‘speck’ and musky meat, the Washenzi or the crocodiles.
Our most artful dodge was, however, to come. The Baloch have ceased firing, confessing their matchlocks to be no ‘good,’ but they force the boatmen to obey us, and they take great interest in the sport, as Easterns will when they see work well done. My companion lands with his black woodman carrying both smashers: they grope painfully through mangrove-thicket where parasitical oysters wound the legs with their sharp edges, and where the deep mud and shaking bog admit a man to the knees. After a time, reaching a clear spot, they take up a position where the bush-screened bank impends the deepest water, and signal me to drive the herd. The latter, after rubbing their backs against the big canoe, rise to breathe; I hoist a scarlet cloth upon a tall pole, and the beasts, inquisitive as kangaroos, expose themselves to gratify a silly curiosity. My companion has two splendid standing shots, and the splashing and circling in the stream below tell the accuracy of his aim. The dodge was suggested by seeing antelope thus arrested in their flight, and by remembering the red whirligigs with bits of mirror, used in former years by the French chasseur to kill hares.
Whilst in the pursuit of the animals that were retiring to the other end of the pool, I saw a hole bursting in the stream close to the bows of the canoe, and a dark head of portentous dimensions rose with a snort, a grunt, and a spirt. Mamba! Mamba! shout the Baloch, and yet the old rogue disdains to flinch or fly. A cove from the Colt strikes him full in the front; his brain is pierced, he rises high, he falls with a crash upon the wave, and all that hulking flesh cannot keep in a little life. Sultan Mamba has for ever disappeared from the home of the hippopotamus: never shall he bully canoe-men, never shall he break nigger’s leg again.
We soon learned the lesson that these cold-blooded beasts may be killed with a pistol ball, if hit in the right place,—under the shoulder for the heart, and in the ear for the remarkably small brain, whose pan is strongly boxed in. Otherwise they carry as much lead as elephants. By 10 A. M. we had slain six, besides wounding I know not how many of the animals. They might be netted, but the operation would not pay in a pecuniary sense: the ivory of small teeth, under 4 lbs. each, is worth little. Moreover, the herds are apt to shift quarters after an excess of bullying, and are normally shy when exposed to the perpetual popgunning of the Baloch. Even the vulture is absent—a bad sign. We did not often return to this sport, finding the massacre monotonous, and such cynegetics little more exciting than pheasant shooting.
Our first partie concluded with a bath in the Panga-ni, which here has natural ‘bowers for dancing and disport,’ fit for Diana and her suite: in these unclassical lands they are haunted, not by fairies, but by monkeys. About a dwarf creek trees cluster on three sides of a square, regularly as if planted, and rope-like creepers, the West African tie-tie, bind together the supporting stems and hang a curtain to the canopy of imperious sylvan shade. The consumptive Jemadar suffered severely from the sun; he still, however, showed some ardour for sport. ‘A mixture of a lie,’ says Bacon bluntly, ‘doth ever add to pleasure.’ There was abundant amusement in the little man’s grandiloquent romancing; a hero and a Rustam he had slain his dozens; men quaked—in far Balochistan—at the mention of his name; his sword-blade never fell upon a body without cutting it in twain, and, ’faith, had he wielded it as he did his tongue, the weapon would indeed have been deadly. At Panga-ni he had told us all manner of F. M. Pinto tales concerning the chase at Chogwe, and his pal, an old Mzegura woodsman, had promised us elephants, giraffes, and wild cattle. But when we pressed the point our guide shirked the trial; his son was absent, war raged in the clan, his family wanted provisions: he was ever coming on the morrow, and—the morrow never came. This convinced me that the tale of game in the dry season was apocryphal. Chogwe then offered few attractions, and we left the bazar on Thursday, Feb. 26: my companion walked to Panga-ni, making a route-survey, whilst the Jemadar and his tail escorted me in the large canoe.
This trial trip to Fuga, which covered 150 miles in 11 days, had supplied me with a fair budget of experience and had drawn my attention to an important point, namely, the difference between our distances and those of M. Erhardt’s map. Whilst we placed the head-quarter village 37 miles in direct line, and along the devious path 74 or 75, he gave the measures respectively as 82 and 100. Hence I was led to question all the distances in the remote parts: the road between Mombasah and Kilima-njaro had already been reduced from 200 to 130 miles; and, to judge from analogy, a little further subtraction might be applied. Our longest march was only 17 miles: after 4 days’ continued work the slaves were dead-beat; our escort, who carried only their weapons, murmured loudly at our habits, and the Panga-ni people considered the rate of walking excessive. Without measuring instruments or the habit of correct timing, it is difficult to estimate distance. Some years afterwards, when ascending the Cameroons Mountain, I found, by taping, 11,570 feet to be the length of a march, which the whole party had set down at the lowest estimate as five miles. Twenty miles in a tropical sun, without water and over rough ground, where the step is shortened, will appear 40 in Europe, whilst the hour’s halt seems but a few minutes.[[44]]
For two days after returning to Panga-ni we abstained from taking exercise. On the third we walked out several miles East along the shore, and N. West inland, under the hottest of suns and over burning ground, to explore a cavern, or rather a tunnel in the limestone rock of which the natives, who came upon it when clearing out a well, had circulated the most exaggerated accounts. My companion already complained of his last night’s labour, an hour with the sextant upon damp sands in the chilly dew. This excursion finished the work. On entering the house we found Caetano, who had accompanied us to Fuga, suffering from aches in the shoulders and a cold sensation creeping up the legs. Such sensations heralded the fever, a malignant bilious remittent like ‘General Tazo’ of Madagascar: as on the Niger, this ‘acclimatizing fever’ usually appears before the 16th day. My companion was prostrated a few hours afterwards, and next day I followed their example. Valentino, who escaped at Panga-ni, came in for his turn at Zanzibar; and, as a proof that the negro enjoys no immunity, Sidi Bombay suffered severely in early June.
I have no doubt that had Dr Steinhaeuser been with us, or had we been acquainted with the prophylactic treatment of quinine, first developed by the later Niger expeditions, and afterwards practised by myself with so much success on the West Coast of Africa, we should have escaped with a light visitation instead of dangerous and almost deadly attacks. But we had also imprudently taxed strength and endurance to the utmost, before our constitutions had been accustomed to the climate. As a rule, the traveller in these lands should at first avoid exposure and fatigue beyond a certain point to the very best of his ability. He might as well practise sitting upon a coal fire as hardening himself to the weather—which green men have attempted. Dr Bialloblotsky, a Polish professor who had begun travelling at the end of a long life of sedentary study, would practise walking bare-headed in the Zanzibar sun: the result was congestion of the brain. Others have paced bare-footed upon an exposed terrace, with ulceration of the legs and temporary lameness, as the total results. The most successful in resisting the miasma are they who tempt it the least, and the best training for a long hungry march in these lands is repose with good living. Man has then stamina to work upon: he may exist, like the camel, upon his own fat. Those who fine themselves down by exercise and abstinence before such journeys commit the error of beginning where they ought to end.
We spent no happy time in the house of the Wali Meriko, who, luckily for us, was still absent at Zanzibar. The Jemadar, seeing that we could do nothing, took leave, committing us to Allah and to Said bin Salim. The Banyans intended great civility; they would sit with us for hours, asking, like Orientals, the silliest of questions, and thinking withal that they were making themselves agreeable. Repose was out of the question. During the day gnats and flies added another sting to the horrors of fever: by night rats nibbled our feet; mosquitos sang their songs of triumph; and torturing thirst made the terrible sleeplessness yet more terrible. Our minds were morbidly fixed upon one point, the arrival of our vessel: we had no other occupation but to rise and gaze, and to exchange regrets as a sail hove in sight, drew near, and passed by. We knew that there would be no failure on the part of our thoughtful friend, who had written to promise us a ‘Batela’ on March 1. But we doubted the possibility of an Arab or an Msawahili doing anything in proper time. The craft had been duly despatched from Zanzibar before the end of February, but the fellows who manned her being men of Tumbatu, could not pass their houses unvisited,—they wasted a precious week, and they did not make Panga-ni till the evening of March 5.
After sundry bitter disappointments, we had actually hired a Banyan’s boat that had newly arrived, when the long-expected ‘Batela’ ran into the river. Not a moment was to be lost. Said bin Salim, who had been a kind of nurse, superintended the embarkation of our belongings. My companion, less severely treated, was able to walk to the shore; but I—alas, for manliness!—was obliged to be supported like a bed-ridden old woman. The Arabs were civil, and bade us a friendly farewell. The Wasawahili, however, audibly contrasted the present with the past, and drew indecorous conclusions from the change which a few days had worked in the man who bore a 24 lb. gun with a 4 ounce ball.