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Updated: May 2, 2025
And when I go out to the field and see little old Siwash lining up against a bunch of overgrown hippos from a university with a catalogue as thick as a city directory, the old mud-and-perspiration smell gets in my nostrils, and the desire to get under the bunch and feel the feet jabbing into my ribs boils up so strong that I have to hold on to myself with both hands.
Ordinarily he would have lighted three or four at a distance of five or six yards from each other, and thus found comparative immunity from the attacks of lions and hippos, but the baobab it reminded him of a certain incident when he was "attached" to the Haussas was able to protect both rear and flank from the voracious assaults of any four-footed creatures.
He had read of hippos swamping boats by seizing the narrow bows or keel in their vast jaws, and he wished to be prepared for a possible attack. Presently the boat again rocked as another animal took to the water, then the new-comer dislodged the other with a snap of the jaws, and the first, with a complaining grunt, surged down the channel.
It has not got any trees on it yet, but by next season or so it doubtless will have. The grass is stabbled down into paths by hippos, and just as I have realised who are the road-makers, they appear in person.
Had I followed Anfossi's judgment and gone along the bank sixty yards ahead, instead of sixty yards astern of the Deliverance, at the exact moment at which I sank into my deck chair, the hippo would have emerged at my feet. It is even betting as to which of us would have been the more scared. The next day, and for days after, we saw nothing but hippos.
After a quick walk of about half a mile, during which time the cry of the hippos had been several times repeated, I observed six of these curious animals standing in the water about shoulder-deep.
Yes, at this point in its youth it was indeed a friendly river in every sense of the word. There are three reasons, ordinarily, why one cannot bathe in the African rivers. In the first place, they are nearly all disagreeably muddy; in the second place, cold water in a tropical climate causes horrible congestions; in the third place they swarm with crocodiles and hippos.
They swept on under trees, hung with orchids, where dragon-flies flashed in and out of the sunlight. This was the country of the hippos, and the banks were scored by their massive feet; it was also, as they found to their cost, the haunt of ibots, a fly with a poisonous bite.
There were also certain of the cities which paid tribute to Archelaus: Strato's Tower and Sebaste, with Joppa and Jerusalem; for as to Gaza, and Gadara, and Hippos, they were Grecian cities, which Caesar separated from his government, and added them to the province of Syria. Now the tribute-money that came to Archelaus every year from his own dominions amounted to six hundred talents.
There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sand-banks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side.
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