And lastly, but not leastly, this diabolical fowl, although it can hang head downwards in a temperature of 140° for many hours without showing any signs of inconvenience other than a slightly intensified complexion, and although it greets with contumely blows inflicted with the various missiles to be found at a moment’s notice in an average tent, yet, should it be left with natives other than its rightful owner for one short hour, it is so overcome with modesty that it reverts rapidly and without perceptible residue into its original invisible components. The extent to which the kuku enters into one’s very existence in Africa is, I feel sure, a sufficient excuse for this digression. In fact, I believe that, were it not for the counter-irritation produced by the camp goats, I should have "kuku" on the brain. Having successfully wrestled with the athletic cause of this digression, and unsuccessfully with a prehistoric gun that a neighbouring chief brought me for medical treatment, and dreamt that a rooster with 10 ft. tusks was dancing the double shuffle on my chest, I descended into the valley, and after two hours’ walking reached the Semliki, a fine river, here sixty to seventy yards wide, with a current of about five miles an hour. When I had, with the greatest difficulty, wedged myself in a very long, very unstable, and appallingly leaky piece of firewood (called by courtesy a canoe), and had with still greater difficulty dissuaded fifteen gentlemen from risking the voyage in my company, in the lucid intervals of the amazement with which I viewed the frantic efforts of my Charon (for such he was like to prove) to keep the stick’s head up-stream, I gathered from a benevolent philanthropist on shore that a woman had been taken that morning by a crocodile from the very spot where we came to land, and that on no account must I permit my boys to go to the water’s edge, as the crocodiles were very numerous and very daring. However, suitably cheered by this information, and in defiance of all such paltry laws of nature as gravity, we eventually did succeed in landing safely on the other side; how or why I cannot say, as only the two ends of the canoe were in the water, the middle, where I sat, being slightly raised above the surface. I suppose the whole concern had warped. Whatever the cause, I did not fancy trusting my baggage in her, so I sent up the river, and after much yelling and more delay, another more serviceable concern was produced. Having fixed on a place for my tent, I left the boys to attend to the passage of my belongings, and went out in search of dinner.