We Had Travelled Upwards Of 200 Miles Without Having Seen So Much As A Gazelle, Neither Had We Passed Any Tracks Of Large Game, Except, Upon One Occasion, Those Of A Few Giraffes.

I had been told that the Dinder country was rich in game, but, at this season, it was swarming with Arabs, and was so much disturbed that everything had left the country, and the elephants merely drank during the night, and retreated to distant and impenetrable jungles.

At night we heard a lion roar, but this, instead of being our constant nightingale, as upon the Settite river, was now an uncommon sound. The maneless lion is found on the banks of the Dinder; all that I saw, in the shape of game, in the neighbourhood of that river and the Rahad, were a few hippopotami and crocodiles. The stream of the Dinder is obstructed with many snags and trunks of fallen trees that would be serious obstacles to rapid navigation: these are the large stems of the soont (Acacia Arabica), that, growing close to the edge, have fallen into the river when the banks have given way. I was astonished at the absence of elephants in such favourable ground; for some miles I walked along the margin of the river without seeing a track of any date. Throughout this country, these animals are so continually hunted that they have become exceedingly wary, and there can be little doubt that their numbers are much reduced. Even in the beautiful shooting country comprised between the river Gash and Gallabat, although we had excellent sport, I had been disappointed at the number of elephants, which I had expected to find in herds of many hundreds, instead of forty or fifty, which was the largest number that I had seen together.

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