*SEMLIKI VALLEY AND KAVALLI’S COUNTRY.* Leaving this country with regret, I descended into the valley once more and marched north, crossing the Semliki to avoid the swamps mentioned by Colonel Lugard at the westerly bend of the river, and recrossed about six miles from where the river enters the lake. For some distance the mournful monotony of aloe and euphorbia is broken by groves of the stately borassus palm. The few miserable Wanyoro, who are sparsely scattered over the plain, were absolutely destitute. The prolonged drought had dried up the maize and millet, and the beans, which form their main food supply, were finished, so that three hippo that I killed for them raised me to a giddy pinnacle of fame; my tent became, for the time being, a second Lourdes, droves of pilgrims pouring in to pay homage to my .303. Their astonishment, when I showed them the size of the bullet and how the magazine worked, was most ludicrous. They had heard how it would drop a huge elephant without a wriggle of his trunk, and they had heard the three shots and could see the three hippo tied to the bank, and had imagined, I suppose, that it was a sort of 7-pounder; so that when they held a cartridge with its pencil-like bullet in their hand, and the truth gradually dawned on them, they would drop it like a hot potato. Some, when I started the mechanism, fairly took to their heels. A native’s estimate of a gun varies proportionately with the size of the bore, and his idea of killing range is ten yards, or, if the sportsman is something of a marksman, perhaps twenty. I was fortunate in bringing off several shots at about four hundred to five hundred yards at nsunu,[#] and natives, having no unit of distance, consider everything from two hundred yards to about five miles as the same thing. I have several times heard my gun-bearer, Makanjira, who is a great admirer of the gun, solemnly explaining to an open-mouthed audience how he had seen me kill beasts at such a distance, pointing to a hill some three or four miles away. Consequently, its powers were magnified to the most prodigious proportions, and on the march excited natives would point to mere specks on the horizon, inform me they were buck, and expect me to kill them on the instant; they never gave me any of the credit--it was the gun, the wonderful gun, and I only obtained a reflected glory as its possessor. After crossing the river, I found the natives very nervous and suspicious, and though I visited the village near which I camped, and induced the chief to come to the river-bank to see one of the hippo, which I told him he might have, the following morning, on sending for a guide, I found that they had "shot the moon," carrying off their half-dozen miserable goats, and fled into the bush. [#] Nsunu: _Cobus Thomasi_.