natives,
often too exhausted at the end to eat. A man who cannot march thirty
miles a day, and fulfil all the other requirements, should relegate
elephant hunting to the world of dreams. All the big successful elephant
poachers are well known: most of them are English, some of them are
Boers, a few only French or American; but seldom does a German attempt
it or live to repeat his experience. Far better to shut his eyes to this
illicit traffic and assist these strange soldiers of fortune to get
their ivory to the coast, and then enjoy the due reward of this
complaisant attitude.

THE BIRDS OF THE AIR

I think it is rather a pity that no naturalist has studied the birds of
German East Africa in the intimate and friendly spirit that many men
have done at home. It has been said that the bright plumage of Central
African birds is given them as compensation for the charm of song that
is a monopoly of the European bird. That this is the case in the damp
forests and swamps and reed beds along the Rufigi and other big rivers,
there is no doubt. Gaudy parrots and iridescent finches flash through
the foliage of trees along the Mohoro river, monkeys slide down the
ropes formed by parasitic plants that hang from the tree branches, to
dip their hands in the water to drink; only to flee, chattering to the
tree-tops, as they meet the gaze of apparently slumbering crocodiles.
Great painted butterflies flit above the beds of lilies that fringe the
muddy lagoons, the hippopotamus wallows lazily in the warm sunlit
waters. Here, it is true, is the Equatorial Africa of our schoolboy
dreams; and the birds have little but their glittering plumage to
recommend them.

But we are apt to forget that the greater portion of Tropical Africa,
certainly all that is over five hundred feet above the sea, which
constitutes the greater part of the country with the exception of the
coast region, is not at all true to the picture that most of us have in
our minds. For the character of the interior is vastly different: great
rolling plains of yellow grass and thorn scrub, with the denser foliage
of deciduous trees along the river-banks. Here, indeed, you may find
sad-coloured birds that are gifted with the sweetest of songs. In the
bed of the Morogoro River lives a warbler who sings from the late
afternoon until dusk, and he is one of the very few birds that have that
deep contralto note, the "Jug" of the nightingale. And there are little
wrens wi