Bruce was a modest man, who had no foolish vanity to tell him that
his own theories were superior to brute facts. “My plan has been a
washout,” you can hear him grumbling. “Somewhere, aside from the
human being, those tsetses must get the trypanosomes--maybe it’s like
the nagana--maybe they can live in wild beasts’ blood too....”
Now if Bruce had theories that were a little too simple he was just
the same an exceedingly crafty experimenter; if he had a foolish
faith in his experiments, he had the persistence to claw his way
out of the bogs of disappointment that his simplicity and love of
gorgeous deeds got him into. What a stubborn man he was! For, when
you think of the menagerie of birds, beasts, fishes and reptiles
Uganda is, you wonder why he didn’t pack his bags and start back for
England. But no. Once more the canoe man paddled Bruce and his lady
across to that tangled shore, and they caught flies in places where
for three years no man had been. Strange experiments they made in a
heat to embarrass a salamander--one laborious complicated record in
his notes tells of two thousand, eight hundred and seventy-six flies
(which could never have bitten a human sleeping-sickness patient) fed
on five monkeys--and two of these monkeys came down with the disease!
“The trypanosomes must be hiding in wild animals!” Bruce cries.
So they go to the dangerous Crocodile Point, and catch wild pigs
and African gray and purple herons; they bleed sacred ibises and
glossy ones; they stab and get blood from plovers and kingfishers
and cormorants--and even crocodiles! Everywhere they look for those
deadly, hiding, thousandth-of-an-inch-long wigglers.
They caught tsetse flies on Crocodile Point. See the fantastic
picture of them there, gravely toiling at a job fit for a hundred
searchers to take ten years at. Bruce sits with his wife on the sand
in the middle of a ring of bare-backed paddlers who squat round them.
The tsetses buzz down onto the paddlers’ backs. The fly-boys pounce
on them, hand them to Bruce, who snips off their heads, waves the
buzzing devils away from his own neck, determines the sex of each fly
caught, dissects out its intestine--and smears the blood in them on
thin glass slides....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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