them, the reason
of this being that the nature of the soil frequently changed from causes
with which I am not acquainted, so that places which might be safe
enough to cross one month would certainly swallow the wayfarer the next.
Never did I see a more dreary and depressing scene. Miles on miles of
quagmire, varied only by bright green strips of comparatively solid
ground, and by deep and sullen pools fringed with tall rushes, in which
the bitterns boomed and the frogs croaked incessantly: miles on miles of
it without a break, unless the fever fog can be called a break. The only
life in this great morass was that of the aquatic birds, and the animals
that fed on them, of both of which there were vast numbers. Geese,
cranes, ducks, teal, coot, snipe, and plover swarmed all around us, many
being of varieties that were quite new to me, and all so tame that one
could almost have knocked them over with a stick. Among these birds I
especially noticed a very beautiful variety of painted snipe, almost the
size of a woodcock, and with a flight more resembling that bird's than
an English snipe's. In the pools, too, was a species of small alligator
or enormous iguana, I do not know which, that fed, Billali told me, upon
the waterfowl, also large quantities of a hideous black water-snake, of
which the bite is very dangerous, though not, I gathered, so deadly as a
cobra's or a puff adder's. The bull-frogs were also very large, and
with voices proportionate to their size; and as for the mosquitoes--the
"musqueteers," as Job called them--they were, if possible, even worse
than they had been on the river, and tormented us greatly. Undoubtedly,
however, the worst feature of the swamp was the awful smell of
rotting vegetation that hung about it, which was at times positively
overpowering, and the malarious exhalations that accompanied it, which
we were of course obliged to breathe.

On we went through it all, till at last the sun sank in sullen splendour
just as we reached a spot of rising ground about two acres in extent--a
little oasis of dry in the midst of the miry wilderness--where Billali
announced that we were to camp. The camping, however, turned out to be
a very simple process, and consisted, in fact, in sitting down on the
ground round a scanty fire made of dry reeds and some wood that had been
brought with us. However, we made the best we could of it, and smoked
and ate with such appetite as the smell of damp, stifling heat wo