Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 24, 2025
On arriving here we were delighted to find the house free from sand-flies or mosquitoes, but in the plantations where my daily walks led me, the day-biting mosquitoes swarmed, and seemed especially to delight in attaching my poor feet.
The first night they did this I got no sleep until morning, when it was cool enough for me to roll myself in my blanket and put on a head-net. Afterward we used fine nets of a kind of cheese-cloth. They were hot, but they kept out all, or almost all, of the sand-flies and other small tormentors. Here we overtook the rearmost division of Captain Amilcar's bullock- train.
Indeed, ants, mosquitoes, and sand-flies literally feast upon the wayfarer, until the entire surface of his face and limbs becomes excoriated. How the natives with their exposed bodies exist under such circumstances is a mystery. The redundancy of insect and reptile life is wonderful in equatorial regions, but as regards the mosquito, where is this pest not encountered?
The crickets chirp from sunset to sunrise, and often during the day, when the weather is cloudy. The bêterouge is exceeding numerous in these extensive wilds, and not only man, but beasts and birds, are tormented by it. Mosquitos are very rare after you pass the third island in the Demerara, and sand-flies but seldom appear.
The sand-flies are also vexatious insects, and so minute, that one would imagine it needless to provide any defence against them; yet, wherever they bite, their poison occasions itching and painful inflammations. Besides these, there are ticks, flies, wasps, and many more insects which are very troublesome.
The wood through which we now drove was all on fire, smoking, flaming, crackling, and burning round us. The sun glared upon us from the cloudless sky, and the air was one cloud of sand-flies and mosquitoes. I covered both my children's faces with veils and handkerchiefs, and repented not a little in my own breast of the rashness of my undertaking.
At this season we had nothing to complain of mosquitoes or sand-flies, nor was 'Insektenpulver' wanted inside the house. The only physiological curiosity in the settlement was a spotted boy, a regular piebald, like a circus-pony; even his head grew a triangular patch of white hair. We wanted him for the London Aquarium, but there were difficulties in the way.
His reverend air and his long black coat proclaimed him a clergyman past all possibility of doubt. He seemed to have got to heaven before death, the place was so attractive; but being still in a body terrestrial, he may have found the meat market rather distant, and mosquitoes and sand-flies sometimes a plague. As I walked up the beach, he drove by me in an open wagon with a hired man.
There were several houses on the rise of the farther bank, all with thatched roofs, some of them with walls of upright tree-trunks, some of them daub and wattle. Into one of the latter, with two rooms, we took our belongings. The sand-flies were bothersome at night, coming through the interstices in the ordinary mosquito-nets.
The day was very unpropitious as there had been a shower of rain in the morning, and there was no sun, so it had to be smoked with manure in one of the tents. What with the mosquitoes and sand-flies, men, horses, and cattle were kept in a continual fever.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking