A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries: And of the Discovery of Lakes Shirwa and Nyassa, 1858-1864Livingstone, David
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A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries: And of the Discovery of Lakes Shirwa and Nyassa, 1858-1864
Livingstone, David
Africa, Central -- Description and travel; Africa, Central -- Discovery and exploration
A few days before we came, they caught three buffaloes in pitfalls in one
night, and, unable to eat them all, left one to rot. During the night
the wind changed and blew from the dead buffalo to our sleeping-place;
and a hungry lion, not at all dainty in his food, stirred up the putrid
mass, and growled and gloated over his feast, to the disturbance of our
slumbers. Game of all kinds is in most extraordinary abundance,
especially from this point to below the Kafue, and so it is on
Moselekatso's side, where there are no inhabitants. The drought drives
all the game to the river to drink. An hour's walk on the right bank,
morning or evening, reveals a country swarming with wild animals: vast
herds of pallahs, many waterbucks, koodoos, buffaloes, wild pigs, elands,
zebras, and monkeys appear; francolins, guinea-fowls, and myriads of
turtledoves attract the eye in the covers, with the fresh spoor of
elephants and rhinoceroses, which had been at the river during the night.
Every few miles we came upon a school of hippopotami, asleep on some
shallow sandbank; their bodies, nearly all out of the water, appeared
like masses of black rock in the river. When these animals are hunted
much, they become proportionably wary, but here no hunter ever troubles
them, and they repose in security, always however taking the precaution
of sleeping just above the deep channel, into which they can plunge when
alarmed. When a shot is fired into a sleeping herd, all start up on
their feet, and stare with peculiar stolid looks of hippopotamic
surprise, and wait for another shot before dashing into deep water. A
few miles below Chikumbula's we saw a white hippopotamus in a herd. Our
men had never seen one like it before. It was of a pinkish white,
exactly like the colour of the Albino. It seemed to be the father of a
number of others, for there were many marked with large light patches.
The so-called _white_ elephant is just such a pinkish Albino as this
hippopotamus. A few miles above Kariba we observed that, in two small
hamlets, many of the inhabitants had a similar affection of the skin. The
same influence appeared to have affected man and beast. A dark coloured
hippopotamus stood alone, as if expelled from the herd, and bit the
water, shaking his head from side to side in a most frantic manner. When
the female has twins, she is said to kill one of them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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