326 JOURNEY TO CENTRAL AFRICA.

bank. The peaks were broken and conical in form, and their pale-violet hue showed with fine effect behind the dark line of the gum forests. With every hour of our progress, the vegetation grew more rank and luxuriant. On the eastern bank the gum gave place to the flowering mimosa, which rose in a dense rampart from the water's edge and filled the air with the fragrance of its blossoms. Myriads of wild geese, ducks, cranes, storks, herons and ibises sat on the narrow beaches of sand or circled in the air with hoarse clang and croaking. Among them I saw more than one specimen of that rare and curious water-bird, whose large, horny bill curves upward instead of downward, so that it appears to have been put on the wrong way. As he eats nothing but small fish, which he swallows with his head under water, this is not such a great inconvenience as one would suppose. The bars which occasionally made out into the current served as a resting-place for crocodiles, which now began to appear in companies of ten or fifteen, and the forests were filled with legions of apes, which leaped chattering down from the branches to look at. us. A whole family of them sat on the bank for some time, watching us, and when we frightened them away by our shouts, it was amusing to see a mother pick up her infant ape, and scamper off with it under her arm. The wild fowl were astonishingly tame, and many of them so fat that they seemed scarcely able to fly.

Here and there, along the shore, large broods of the young were making their first essays in swimming. The boatmen took great delight in menacing the old birds with pieces of wood, in order to make them dive under water. There were some superb white cranes, with a rosy tinge along the edges of their wings, and I saw two more of the crested king-herons.