ON AFRICAN RIVERS
I HIRED A STEAMER AND STARTED UP THE RIVER FROM KHARTOUM EARLY on 23rd January, 1925. I shot a few crocodiles on the mudbanks, and on 26th January we came to a country in which there were rufifrons gazelles, but the species was new to me and I was not yet able to tell a good head from a bad one, and so, though I got within shot of some, I did not fire. In the evening we came to Renk, where at the end of a little path that ran down to the river the District Commissioner lived, and looked after the affairs of Dinkas; this was almost the last white man that the engineer and I were to see for most of our journey. Actually he was the last but one; but, when I came to the very last, I had been shooting for some days among burnt reeds, and every reed had left a gray mark on my khaki jacket, and when you meet a man briefly you must judge him partly by his clothes, because they are what are seen first. And so the final white man on that river and I never got to know each other quite so well as the friendly District Commissioner and I did. Among other kindnesses he got a hunter for me, who went on board there and then, Issa el Nuer, and a very good hunter he was. I don’t know what he was doing there, for the Nuer country is further South; probably arrangements had been made from Khartoum, but that I don’t remember. He wore a number of charms that dangled from a little bracelet high up on his left arm; and a little lower down, but above the elbow, in case these should ever fail him, he wore a knife. In East Africa one always wore a hunting knife from a belt hanging in the small of one’s back, but Issa el Nuer and his friends rightly thought that it could be much quicker got at where he wore it, as both arms could be brought together and the right hand would have but a short way to go. It seemed to me that it was the better method; but if anything should happen to one’s right arm the East African way would come into its own. I had no hunting knife myself, because I had intended to buy one in Khartoum, having mislaid my old one, but was astonished to find that the only kind they had there had to be pulled out of its handle and unfolded and neatly fixed in again at the other end. But in the end I never needed one. The District Commissioner at Renk told me of a hunter of his own who had as many charms as Issa; he had a text out of the Koran in a little leather satchel such as all Mahommedans wear, a small crucifix, and a bit of wood blessed by a witch-doctor which had come from a tree that had been blasted by lightning. One day he had asked him why he wore the emblems of so many different religions, and the hunter had replied: “In things like that you can never be too careful.”
There I was first shown ambach wood, the lightest wood in the world and, though from the outside it looks like any other wood, one man could easily carry the trunk of any tree of it for which there was room on his shoulder. I said good-bye to the District Commissioner and walked down his path to the river lined by two row’s of such trees as could be got to grow there, and we went on up the river with the shikari and two gun-bearers who had also kindly been found for me. Our ship wooded in sight of a mountain called Mohammed Aga, and that was on latitude 11. Next day I met the Dinkas in one of their villages, a cluster of domed huts with doors built on the Eskimo fashion, small things into which they had to crawl, though the Eskimo’s enemy is the cold, and the Dinka’s the lion. The full dress of a Dinka is a feather in his hair and a necklace of blue beads round his neck; I never saw any of them wear anything more, unless you count as a suit of clothes a mixture mostly made of grey ash with which they smear themselves to keep off the mosquitoes. That day I landed and went after tiang, a reddish beast with a black face, like a rather thin cow, a member of the hartebeeste family. He also was new to me, like the rufifrons gazelle, and again I failed to get a shot through not knowing whether the head was big enough. I was wearing dark glasses, very good things to wear in the tropics, but I should have changed them at sunset, for the light rapidly fades, and just then I came on a roan antelope, which is in any case a dark shadowy beast, and I missed it. Deeply depressed by doing that, I suddenly had complete consolation by finding that it was a female. On the way back to the ship my hunter showed me a guinea-fowl, using the Arabic word for it, which I knew, though I knew no word of his Nuer language, and I fired more accurately at it than I had done at the roan, with my.350 rifle. I started out after breakfast next day at 4.30 to look for buffalo, which some Dinkas had promised to show us, but no buffaloes appeared. In the afternoon I got a tiang and a white-eared cob; and we went on and came to the country of the Shillooks, and that night we tied up at Malakal under some oleanders. Next day the Shillooks in their long canoes were on the river in large numbers. And presently we passed a place where they were all gathered, dressed in their full dress, which was a great deal more than the Dinkas’. For one of their chiefs had died and they had gathered to bury him. I wrote to my wife on 21st January: “We passed by a herd of about seventeen hippoes in the water yesterday, but it was hard to count them, because they were never all up together. I see how they came by their name: their heads heave up out of the river now and then like the heads of monstrous horses.” And the letter continues on 2nd February: “Yesterday I got a reed-buck, but the various pursuits of that day are too numerous to recount. To-day I started off at sunrise and am just back after getting two water-buck.... Yesterday unfortunately I wounded a tiang, being too full of quinine. I never got him, but in following him I came on a reedbuck and got him. We went on up the river and presently they all saw a lion near the bank and a leopard running behind him, so we stopped the ship and got after him. The leopard got up almost under our feet and hopped away a few yards into a long thin strip of high grass, into which the shikari went to put him up like a woodcock, but I would not allow that, nor did I go myself. The strip of high grass was only ten yards wide and two or three hundred long. The leopard was lying down there and the lion must be with him; so after reflection and advice I got matches and we burned the strip of grass, while I sat outside it with my.470, and my shot-gun on the ground beside me, and — for the matter of that — my.350, though there couldn’t have been time for all three. But somehow the lion and leopard had got away and we never saw them any more. Soon we stopped again, this time for a water-buck which through slight fatigue, for I had been hunting off and on since early dawn, and much quinine, I missed.”
We were now on a lonely river, and a strange river, for the Bahr-el-Zeraf rises in marshes just beside the White Nile, or the Bahr-el-Jebel as it is named in those parts, so close that a canal has actually been cut joining the two rivers; and then it flows away to the North and goes into the White Nile again. We steered the whole length of this marshy lonely river and came again to the White Nile after four days. On 5th February I wrote: “We are on a better river now, the Bahr-el-Jebel, but the papyrus continues as far as the eye can see.”
I don’t remember now what was the cause of the awful feeling of loneliness with which the Bahr-el-Zeraf oppressed me: it can hardly have been its marshes, for there were marshes everywhere. Perhaps it was quinine, or perhaps it was the virus of the anopheles mosquito with which the quinine was successfully fighting in the battlefield of my blood. It may be of passing interest to notice, what first became clear to me on that river, the name of the giraffe when he is at home. It is obviously zeraf, or ziraffe, and then the French, who seem to have travelled ahead of us all over the world, even to India, had made a shot at the spelling by replacing the Arabic Z with a French G. The French G is soft, and so not so far from Z; but when we copied the French name for it with our harder G we got a long way from the original name, and the giraffe in the Zoo sounds almost a different family from the zeraf of the lands he knew.
We now turned down the Nile, or the Bahr-el-Jebel as they call it there: “We reached Lake No out of the Bahr-el-Jebel a few hours after nightfall on 6 th February. Yesterday morning I went ashore at 6 and after a few hundred yards we met a marsh. Soon the shikari went on ahead and got deeper and deeper, walking amongst blue water-lilies, and there seemed nothing for it but to turn back. This we did, but then I saw some trees in the distance, and to go back to the ship meant to lose the morning’s shoot, so I tried again and we got through and came to dry land. At about nine we saw three reed-buck a long way off, so we crouched down amongst low half-burnt reeds and watched them, but they were moving slowly and I saw that they would soon cross the line of our wind, so we had to move on a bit and, seeing no better chance, I took a shot at over three hundred yards and saw the bullet hit up dust, showing that it must have passed just underneath him, and as he jumped once or twice it must have just touched his fur. So I fired again, aiming higher still, and dropped him stone dead at about 330 yards.
“Then we left Lake No and got into the Bahr-el-Gazal, after first walking back with the head and some meat of the reed-buck through the blue water-lilies, of which we picked a bunch. Soon that great prize a Mrs. Grey’s waterbuck was seen; the bank was bounded by deep marshes and reeds over our heads; through these we went some way till the shikari showed me the horns and part of the head of the Mrs. Grey. I aimed at where I thought the body was, but never having seen one before, and having just been shooting at reed-buck, had no idea what a big beast he was. The bullet went over him and away he went, a fine beast with magnificent horns. They signalled from the ship that another had gone another way, and the pursuit of the second one added to our great discomforts, and after a while we toiled back to the steamer not having seen any more of this Mrs. Grey and having missed the other. I took off my wet things and, having a headache, went to bed. In little more than ten minutes more Mrs. Grey were sighted, on the other bank, a mile away on the edge of the dry land. A sailor went into the marsh and was soon up to his neck, and Mr. Smyth, the engineer, said it couldn’t be done. But I said I would, and so began about the biggest stalk of my life. After a bare quarter of a mile we lost bottom and the rushes began to sink, their roots no longer supporting us. The shikari alone went on like a will-o’-the-wisp, but neither I nor my gun-bearers could follow, and a gun-bearer who tried went smilingly up to his neck and had not found bottom even then, so I gave him a hand back. Meanwhile I had sent back to the ship for two oars, and I suppose we all stood there with water over our hips for more than half an hour.
“The man that I sent for oars not only brought them, but two of the sailors also came with pules. With these we got over the worst places, till we came at last to high reeds amongst which the depth of water was fairly regular and we were seldom up to our waists. Cover was perfect, and at long last we came near to the edge of the swamp and could see the Mrs. Grey through the reeds easier than they could see us. I chose and fired, and he dropped so suddenly that none of the herd moved. And when he was skinned and cut up for meat the return journey began, and we were cheery enough to ignore the tiny thorns that sometimes strike one in showers and remain in one’s skin. On this day I had two breakfasts, but missed my lunch. Tea and dinner we had at the usual hours.
“We anchored in mid-stream so as not to waste good country in bad light, and at eight this morning we steamed on and soon saw white-eared cob. We landed, as usual in a marsh, and when we’d gone ten yards through the high reeds my shikari stopped and put his slippers on, which he takes off for water. I interpreted this as a precaution against a snake, and so it was, but such a snake as could have eaten him as well with his slippers on as off, a nineteen-foot python with his head rested on one of his hugest folds looking at us with big yellow eyes. I aimed between his eyes, but aimed low so as to make missing impossible, and my.350 bullet went through the top of the great fold that his head was resting on, and on through his neck. They called to the steamer for a spear before actually handling him and, as a precaution, my shikari put its wide blade through the neck, but it wasn’t necessary. Then I went on after the white-eared cob. We got out of the marsh fairly soon and only crossed a narrow one further on, and later we came to a hard, burnt plain fill of pits that had been made by the feet of elephants before it was dry. And I fired many inaccurate shots and got the white-eared cob that I was after, a better head than my first.
“8th February. We anchored here and I went out again at 4.30 and got two white-eared cob, one equal to the one in the morning, one much bigger. This makes four, the limit for white-eared cob.
“9.45 a m. We saw a small herd of waterbuck with one very big male, and I’ve just been ashore and got him. We steamed past him about a quarter of a mile and then stalked back on him. For the first time for some time I got ashore dry. It is a lovely head.
Last night there was a full moon, and we heard the hippos roaring; possibly Another came near us, for at one moment our donkeys panicked. Bag so far: 1 Mrs. Grey, 1 Python, 4 white-eared Cob, 2 Reed-buck, 1 Tiang, 4 Waterbuck. 5 p m. We are going through papyrus swamps again, probably the least explored part of the earth.”
There are pictures from that time that remain very clear in my memory, without the need of referring to old letters, and one is the eyes of the python, which I described in my letter as yellow, but which were rather orange and the colour of flame. I remember Issa el Nuer, who was in front of me on a sort of track through the marshes where the water was only up to our knees, stopping and putting his shoes on and turning to me and saying, “We can’t go any further. You must shoot.”
I did not know a word of his language, but I understood clearly enough what he was saying, and the python looked at us like an evil face leaning on folded arms, for that was the way his head rested on one of his huge coils. And I remember the blue water-lilies growing all round us, which did not survive half an hour in a glass of water when we got them back to the ship; and my shot through the curtain of reeds at the big antelope after my long stalk; and the curious food that these animals were eating, which was date-stones which were lying on the ground near the marks of an old camp-fire. And very clearly indeed I remember Issa el Nuer standing beside me with his spear lifted, when we were burning the reeds into which the lion had gone, to protect me, who was armed with two rifles.