A few miles further on, one of my Congolese soldiers, who, against all orders, lagged behind a few minutes, mysteriously disappeared, and an exhaustive search failed to find any trace either of him or of natives. The country was very open, and he was carrying a rifle, so they must have spirited him away very cleverly. From here to the mouth of the Zaraf there is only one village, so that for food I was entirely dependent on my rifle. At first there was no difficulty, as the river swarmed with hippo, and there were numbers of hartebeeste, Mrs. Gray’s waterbuck, leucotis, reedbuck, waterbuck, and roan. A magnificent bull of the latter species I at first took to be a sable, owing to the extraordinary length of his horns, and with the cussedness of his kind he stood and watched us all pass at a distance of thirty yards. But for several days afterwards I had the greatest difficulty in obtaining meat, subsisting entirely on pelicans, one day being even reduced to marabout soup, and it was not till within thirty miles of the mouth that I again came into a game country, where the bush comes down to the river. Here I saw numerous giraffe, and one day marched for hours through small herds of cow elephant. It was curious that I saw nothing but bulls on the Nile swamps, while on the Zaraf there were huge numbers of breeding cows, and I only saw the spoor of a very few bulls, and those were mostly small. For days the muddy tide rolls slowly on between banks of sun-baked mud, unrelieved by swamps or vegetation. The flocks of birds no more break the depressing monotony, naught but great, loathly crocodiles, that slip without a sound into the turgid flow, bald-pated marabouts, and screaming kites. No sign of hope; a vast reserve for God’s foulest creatures, and a fitting one. Ye gods, what a land! The old boyhood’s desire to shriek and break something that invariably recurred on Sunday morning broke out afresh, and I felt that I was near that indefinable boundary beyond which is madness. About thirty miles south of the Abiad an extensive Kohr, which was dry when I passed, flows into the Zaraf. Close by there is a small ridge a few feet above the level of the surrounding country; here I camped and saw a great variety of game. Four giraffe came and peered over a bush at me while I was having my bath, and thoroughly enjoyed the novel spectacle. They showed no inclination to move away, and I had a splendid chance of having a good look at them. The situation was quaint. It struck me as an admirable study for René Bull or Mr. Shepherd.