How I Found Livingstone Travels, Adventures And Discoveries In Central Africa Including Four Months Residence With Dr. Livingstone By Sir Henry M. Stanley
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When
About To Bite, This Style Was Shot Out Straight, And The Antennae
Embraced It Closely.
After death the fly lost its distinctive white
marks.
Only one of this species did we see at this camp. The third
fly, called "chufwa," pitched a weak alto-crescendo note, was a
third larger than the house fly, and had long wings. If this insect
sang the feeblest note, it certainly did the most work, and
inflicted the most injury. Horses and donkeys streamed with blood,
and reared and kicked through the pain. So determined was it not
to be driven before it obtained its fill, that it was easily
despatched; but this dreadful enemy to cattle constantly
increased in numbers. The three species above named are, according
to natives, fatal to cattle; and this may perhaps be the reason
why such a vast expanse of first-class pasture is without domestic
cattle of any kind, a few goats only being kept by the villagers.
This fly I subsequently found to be the "tsetse."
On the second morning, instead of proceeding, I deemed it more
prudent to await the fourth caravan. Burton experimented
sufficiently for me on the promised word of the Banyans of Kaole
and Zanzibar, and waited eleven months before he received the
promised articles. As I did not expect to be much over that time
on my errand altogether, it would be ruin, absolute and irremediable,
should I be detained at Unyanyembe so long a time by my caravan.
Pending its arrival, I sought the pleasures of the chase. I was
but a tyro in hunting, I confess, though I had shot a little on the
plains of America and Persia; yet I considered myself a fair shot,
and on game ground, and within a reasonable proximity to game, I
doubted not but I could bring some to camp.
After a march of a mile through the tall grass of the open, we
gained the glades between the jungles. Unsuccessful here, after
ever so much prying into fine hiding-places and lurking corners,
I struck a trail well traversed by small antelope and hartebeest,
which we followed. It led me into a jungle, and down a watercourse
bisecting it; but, after following it for an hour, I lost it,
and, in endeavouring to retrace it, lost my way. However, my
pocket-compass stood me in good stead; and by it I steered for
the open plain, in the centre of which stood the camp. But it was
terribly hard work - this of plunging through an African jungle,
ruinous to clothes, and trying to the cuticle. In order to travel
quickly, I had donned a pair of flannel pyjamas, and my feet were
encased in canvas shoes. As might be expected, before I had gone
a few paces a branch of the acacia horrida - only one of a
hundred such annoyances - caught the right leg of my pyjamas at the
knee, and ripped it almost clean off; succeeding which a stumpy
kolquall caught me by the shoulder, and another rip was the
inevitable consequence.
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