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The Shell People had gathered together upon the sward fronting their line of shallow caves and one of them, the story-teller and singer, was chanting aloud of the river-horse and the great spoil which was theirs, when there was a hungry roar and the yell or shriek of all, men or women not too stricken by fear to be unable to utter sound, and then the leap into their midst of the cave tiger!
The old hunters in the watching crowd took counsel together, and then the chief of them announced what would happen. The "slayer of crocodiles" would, he declared, get above the island and then slowly descend with the current upon the river-horse. "May he shoot straight and his powder be strong," shouted a river- man; "for it is the father of bulls who sleeps there he who has eaten many canoes."
The grassy clods now calved; now half appears The tawny lion, pawing to get free His hinder parts then springs, as broke from bonds, And rampant shakes his brinded mane; the ounce, The libbard, and the tiger, as the mole Rising, the crumbled earth above them threw In hillocks; the swift stag from underground Bore up his branching head; scarce from his mould Behemoth, biggest born of earth, upheaved His vastness; fleeced the flocks and bleating rose As plants; ambiguous between sea and land, The river-horse and scaly crocodile.
It was but little after dusk the night before when the Shell Men were gathered together in merrymaking after good fishing and lucky gathering of what there was to eat along the shores of the shell fish and the egg-laying turtles and the capture of a huge river-horse. It had been, up to midnight, one of the greatest and most joyous meetings the Shell People had joined in for many years.
On one occasion, while Miss Tinné's men were vainly seeking to track the great river-horse, a huge elephant, which had probably pushed forward too far into the river in the keenness of its thirst, was caught up in the current and driven against one of the boats.
Fish-spearing and meat-hunting were set about with promptitude, and on the second day we were happy enough to slay a yearling river-horse, which gave provisions in all sufficiency.
"Still," he continued, "the Celestials have implanted maternal love in the breast of the lioness, of the typhonic river-horse of the Nile." He looked compassionately at the wife of the paraschites. He saw her dark face as she turned it away from the sick girl.
But once Mavoom stopped in a town, at Durban in Natal, and getting drunk he gambled away all his money in a month, and once he lost it in a river, the boat being overset by a river-horse and the ivory and gold sinking out of sight.
I saw the gigantic "river-horse," wallowing through the flood, and dragging his clumsy body out upon the bank. Of these I observed two sorts for it is a fact, though scarce known to naturalists, that there are two distinct kinds of the hippopotamus found in the rivers of Western Africa the one least known being a much smaller animal than the hippopotamus of the Nile and the Hottentots.
Although some who have travelled in Asia and Africa have given the world their descriptions of crocodiles and hippopotamus, or river-horse, yet as the Nile has at least as great numbers of each as any river in the world, I cannot but think my account of it would be imperfect without some particular mention of these animals.
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