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He replied that he had often heard of the tsetse fly, but never having passed through a country infested by it, he was disinclined to believe the stories told of the deadly effects of its bite on cattle and horses.
Beef was impossible; the Portuguese, like the natives, care little for milk, and of the herd, which strangers had attempted to domesticate, remained only a bull and a cow in very poor condition the deaths were attributed to poisonous grass, but I vehemently suspect Tsetse. A daily "quitanda," or market, held under the huge calabashes on a hill behind the house, supplied what was wanted.
We were now opposite a hill on the south called Simba, a lion, from its supposed resemblance to that animal. A large Mabiha population live there, and make raids occasionally over to this side for slaves. 6th May, 1866. Tsetse again. The animals look drowsy. The cow's eye is dimmed; when punctured, the skin emits a stream of scarlet blood. The people hereabouts seem intelligent and respectful.
Twenty miles beyond that, we find forest down to the water's edge, and tsetse.
The points of disagreement are many, and such as to make it entirely improbable that this fly is the true tsetse, though my men unanimously stated that its bite was fatal to horses as well as to donkeys. A descriptive abstract of the tsetse would read thus: "Not much larger than a common house-fly, nearly of the same brown colour as the honey-bee. After-part of the body has yellow bars across it.
I suspect this, like the country of Shinte and Katema, must have been a tsetse district, and only recently rendered capable of supporting other domestic animals besides the goat, by the destruction of the game through the extensive introduction of fire-arms.
When about to leave Moyara on the 25th, he brought a root which, when pounded and sprinkled over the oxen, is believed to disgust the tsetse, so that it flies off without sucking the blood. It is probably but an evanescent remedy, and capable of rendering the cattle safe during one night only.
One ox, which I took down to the sea from the interior, died at Loanda, with all the symptoms of the poison injected by tsetse, which I saw myself in a district a hundred miles from the coast. While at the villages of the Kasabi we saw no evidences of want of food among the people.
It was plain to every one they were going to die. Von Bloom tried bleeding, and various other remedies; but to no purpose. There is no cure for the bite of the tsetse fly! Great, indeed, was now the affliction of the field-cornet. Fortune seemed to be adverse in everything. Step by step he had been sinking for years, every year becoming poorer in worldly wealth.
Innumerable flies appeared, including the Tsetse, and in a few weeks the donkeys had no hair left, either on their ears or legs; they drooped and died one by one. It was in vain that I erected sheds, and lighted fires; nothing would protect them from the flies.
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