190 TO THE LAND OF THE NEGROID Worse than ever was the quarter of a mile back to the felucca. The heat being overpowering and the exertion killing, I was left far too exhausted to take interest in any subsequent proceedings.

A couple of foreign sportsmen once had, with their servants, a most disagreeable experience on the White Nile. Presumably taking their cue from native hunters, they shot at and wounded a hippo from their small boat. He got cross, and, not being disabled, charged the boat furiously, crunching it in his jaws and sinking it. The occupants fortunately escaped with their rifles, and, according to the story handed on to me, succeeding in mounting one of the small islands of " sudd," cut away in course of the clearing of blocks up the river, which come floating down. So far, so good ; but, huddled together, to their dismay the heads of a whole herd of hippo made themselves visible around. Ammunition had mostly gone down with the boat, but fortunately thej'' were not again attacked, and after a long delay succeeded in reaching the bank.

On Lake No—the expanse formed by the junction of the Bahr-el-Ghazal with the Mountain Nile, where the latter comes in from the south to flow eastward awhile as the head of the White Nile the hippos are particularly savage and numerous, and the natives in their slight canoes are in continual danger of being attacked.