Then She Comes To Me, Triumphant, Expecting
Congratulations, And Accompanied By Mosquitoes, And Purrs And Kneads
Upon My Chest Until She Hears Another Rat.
Tuesday, July 23rd.
- Am aroused by violent knocking at the door in
the early gray dawn - so violent that two large centipedes and a
scorpion drop on to the bed. They have evidently been tucked away
among the folds of the bar all night. Well "when ignorance is bliss
'tis folly to be wise," particularly along here. I get up without
delay, and find myself quite well. The cat has thrown a basin of
water neatly over into my bag during her nocturnal hunts; and when
my tea comes I am informed a man "done die" in the night, which
explains the firing of guns I heard. I inquire what he has died of,
and am told "He just truck luck, and then he die." His widows are
having their faces painted white by sympathetic lady friends, and
are attired in their oldest, dirtiest clothes, and but very few of
them; still, they seem to be taking things in a resigned spirit.
These Ajumba seem pleasant folk. They play with their pretty brown
children in a taking way. Last night I noticed some men and women
playing a game new to me, which consisted in throwing a hoop at each
other. The point was to get the hoop to fall over your adversary's
head. It is a cheerful game. Quantities of the common house-fly
about - and, during the early part of the morning, it rains in a
gentle kind of way; but soon after we are afloat in our canoe it
turns into a soft white mist.
We paddle still westwards down the broad quiet waters of the O'Rembo
Vongo. I notice great quantities of birds about here - great
hornbills, vividly coloured kingfishers, and for the first time the
great vulture I have often heard of, and the skin of which I will
take home before I mention even its approximate spread of wing.
There are also noble white cranes, and flocks of small black and
white birds, new to me, with heavy razor-shaped bills, reminding one
of the Devonian puffin. The hornbill is perhaps the most striking
in appearance. It is the size of a small, or say a good-sized hen
turkey. Gray Shirt says the flocks, which are of eight or ten,
always have the same quantity of cocks and hens, and that they live
together "white man fashion," i.e. each couple keeping together.
They certainly do a great deal of courting, the cock filling out his
wattles on his neck like a turkey, and spreading out his tail with
great pomp and ceremony, but very awkwardly. To see hornbills on a
bare sandbank is a solemn sight, but when they are dodging about in
the hippo grass they sink ceremony, and roll and waddle, looking - my
man said - for snakes and the little sand-fish, which are close in
under the bank; and their killing way of dropping their jaws - I
should say opening their bills - when they are alarmed is comic.
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