we could see more than
half a mile of alluvial mud with an arm of the river on either side.
The mud was white, not black--so white that it dazzled the eyes to look
at it.

"Know what it is?" Fred panted.

We did not know, and it was no use guessing. It looked like burned
lime, or else the secretions of about a billion birds; and there were
no birds to speak of.

"Crocodile eggs!" said Fred.

We did not believe that. Even Brown did not believe it. There was no
time to spare, but Brown out of curiosity agreed, so we took the absurd
canoe and poled down to investigate. As we came nearer the solid white
broke up into a myriad dots, and Fred's tale stood confirmed.

They were as long as two hens' eggs laid end to end, or longer. They
lay in the sun in batches in every stage of incubation, and from almost
every batch there were little crocodiles emerging, that made straight
for the water. What worse monster preyed on them to keep their numbers
down, or what disease took care of their prolixity we could not guess.
Perhaps they ate one another, or just died of hunger. The owner of the
boat vowed there were no fish left in the river, and that the
crocodiles did not eat hippo unless it were first dead.

We took another tent from among Fred's loads, changed two of our
porters for stronger ones, and went forward that evening; for it began
to be obvious that the speed had been telling on the cattle. We passed
two more dead heifers within a few miles of the river bank, and there
were other signs that for all our long sleep we were gaining on them.

Perhaps the Greeks thought they had shaken off pursuit. Judging by the
compass they were headed for the shore of Victoria Nyanza, where the
grazing would be better, food for men would be purchaseable, and the
number of villages closely spaced would make the task of night-herding
vastly easier. There isn't a village in that part of Africa that is
not proud to be a host to anybody's cattle, if only because the
ownership of so much living wealth casts glory on all who come in
contact with it.

There was no means of telling whether or not we were over the German
border. The boundary line had not been surveyed yet, and on the map
the part where we were was set down as "unexplored," although that was
scarcely accurate; the route was well enough known to Greeks and
Arabs, and other bad characters bent on smuggling or in some other way
defeating the ends of justice.

We marc