Grogan fled, and starved, for the mountain streams were choked with
corpses, the woods were a nightmare horror, to eat and sleep were alike
impossible. He warned his partner and the expedition marched by another
route.
Two very queer kinds of folk he met in the forests: the pygmies and the
ape-men. The pygmies are little hunters and not more than three feet
tall, but sturdy and compact, immensely strong, able to travel through
the pig-runs of the jungle, and brave enough to kill elephants with
their tiny poisoned arrows. He found them kindly, clever little folk,
though all the other explorers have disliked them.
The ape-men were tall, with hanging paunch and short legs, a small
skull and huge jaws, face, body and legs covered with wiry hair. The
hang of the long powerful arms, the slight stoop of the trunk, and the
hunted vacant expression of the face were marked. The twenty or thirty
of them Grogan met were frightened at first but afterward became very
friendly, proud to show him their skill in making fire with their fire
sticks.
Once in the forest he found the skeleton of an ape of gigantic size.
The natives explained that such apes were plentiful, although no white
man has ever seen one. They have a bad habit of stealing negro women.
At the northern end of the Rift, where the country flattens out
toward the Nile, Grogan and Sharp met with the officials of British
Uganda, which was then in a shocking muddle of mutinous black troops,
raids from the Congo, drought and famine. There Mr. Sharp left the
expedition, making his way to Mombasa; the carriers were sent back home
as a good riddance, and Mr. Grogan, with only five faithful attendants,
pushed on down the Nile Valley. The river was blocked with a weed
called the sudd, which a British expedition was trying to clear away,
and Grogan was forced to the eastward through horrible marshlands. He
had in all only fourteen men when he came to the Dinka country, and met
that queer race of swamp folk. They are very tall, some even gigantic,
beautifully built, but broad-footed, walking with feet picked up high
and thrust far forward--the gait of a pelican. At rest they stand on
one leg like a wading bird, the loose leg akimbo with its foot on the
straight leg’s knee. They are fierce, too, and one tribe made an attack
on Grogan’s party. His men threw down their loads, screaming that they
were lost, and the best Congo soldier fell stabbed to the heart, while
two others went down with cracked skulls.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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