188 TO THE LAND OF THE NEGROID pleasing. My companion remarked, as he passed her, that he thought she must be of the Baggara tribe. Catching the word, she instantly turned, and, as if considerably resenting the implication, said : "Ana mush Baggara; ana Habashi " (I am not Baggara ; I am Abyssinian). She was the wife of a soldier, and had been taken in early youth from the neighbourhood of Kassala. Her voice, too, was distinctly an improvement on the hoarse animal utterances of the Arab creature, whom it is difficult sometimes to credit with being human. Even the raw negroid ladies of marshland seemed to approximate sweet femininity more nearly than these.

I determined to cross over to the far island opposite Kodok to try to bag hippo, which were lying at the upstream end some 500 yards away. A walk through the grass on the flat surface might not be disagreeable, and the difficulties encountered were by no means expected.

As the felucca approached the mud shore, two crocodiles, hidden in the grass, silently slipped into the water, and I realized that the nice, soft grass, as it looked from over the river, was cane-like, threequarters of an inch thick in the stem, meeting well over my head in full strength, and matted and tangled ; it would be a formidable obstacle to progress, and the noise of the passage might be considerable. Then, again, it was 1 p.m., and the heat, both direct from the sun, and, almost worse, as the sun was overhead, that also retained and reflected by the grass and transmitted from below, was in-