Palm Tree near the Asua.
Banda with Escort of King's African Rifles.
The house he had prepared for us was built of bamboo framework, supported upon a central row of Y-shaped tree-stems, with a high-pitched roof heavily thatched with elephant-grass, and walls of wattled reeds. The floors of African "bandas" when newly made are beautifully smooth and clean, and strewn with fresh green rushes; the interior is often cunningly divided into various apartments, and the main building is connected with kitchens and offices of the same unsubstantial texture by veranda-shaded passages. In fact, they prove a high degree of social knowledge and taste in the natives, who make them with almost incredible rapidity from the vegetation of the surrounding jungle; and the sensation of entering one of these lofty, dim, cool, and spacious interiors, and sinking into the soft rush-bed of the floor, with something to drink which is, at any rate, not tepid, well repays the glaring severities of a march under an Equatorial sun. The "banda," however, is a luxury of which the traveller should beware, for if it has stood for more than a week it becomes the home of innumerable insects, many of approved malevolence and venom, and spirillum fever is almost invariably caught from sleeping in old shelters or on disused camping-grounds.
Life "on Safari" is rewarded by a sense of completeness and self-satisfied detachment. You have got to "do" so many miles a day, and when you have "done" them your day's work is over. 'Tis a simple programme, which leaves nothing more to be demanded or desired. Very early in the morning, often an hour before daybreak, the bugles of the King's African Rifles sounded réveille. Every one dresses hurriedly by candle-light, eats a dim breakfast while dawn approaches; tents collapse, and porters struggle off with their burdens. Then the march begins. The obvious thing is to walk. There is no surer way of keeping well in Uganda than to walk twelve or fourteen miles a day. But if the traveller will not make the effort, there are alternatives. There is the rickshaw, which was described in the last chapter—restful, but tedious; and the litter, carried on the heads of six porters of different sizes, and shifted every now and then, with a disheartening jerk, to their shoulders and back again—this is quite as uncomfortable as it sounds. Ponies cannot, or at least do not, live in Uganda, though an experiment was just about to be made with them by the Chief of the Police, who is convinced that with really careful stable management, undertaken in detail by the owner himself, they could be made to flourish. Mules have a better chance, though still not a good one. We took one with us on the last spell of "Safari" to Gondokoro, and were told it was sure to die; but we left it in apparently excellent condition and spirits.
