Rolls its red eyes, and shakes its tawny mane.” But the Arabs who travel between the Sudan and Tripoli tell of a long wadi, with water and vegetation, north of Darfur, which takes three days to cross by camel, and this wadi, so they say, is full of wild animals—lions, tigers, giraffe, etc.—which have never been hunted. Siwa is a bad place for snakes, scorpions and tarantulas. The cerestes, or horned viper, is very common, as well as several other poisonous species. One of the most deadly is a little light-coloured snake with a hard prong at the end of its tail like a scorpion, which lies half covered with sand. I also saw a specimen of the puff adder. My house seemed to be a favourite abode of snakes, which may possibly have been because I had a pigeon loft close to it. Several times I was awakened in the night by my dog barking in the room and found a big snake slithering along the floor, or underneath the edge of the matting. Three men were bitten by snakes while I was there and died as a result; in each case they had stepped on a snake with bare feet. Strabo relates that in these parts of Africa the workmen had to wear boots and rub garlic over their feet to protect themselves. The local cure, which seems quite ineffective, is to rub the powdered stems of a broombush on to the bite. Nothing will induce the natives to touch a snake, dead or alive, with their fingers, as they say the smell sticks to them and attracts other snakes. I was only once bitten by a scorpion, and unfortunately I was out on trek without a first-aid box. It was a large, blackish green scorpion, one of the worst kind, and it caught me on the end of one of my fingers. But my men knew what to do from previous experience. They tied my arm tightly at the elbow and the wrist with a tourniquet, and then cut several gashes with a razor blade across the finger which had been bitten. It was very painful during the night, and I had a good deal of fever, but I was none the worse for it after a couple of days. The cure for a scorpion bite is a powder made from a snake’s tail, cooked and pounded, and a few of the natives specialize in making this powder.