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The old bungalow, without windows and with the roof falling in, was a most miserable shelter; and whichever way we turned from the door, a river or a swamp lay before us. Birds, mosquitos, leeches, and large wasps swarmed, also rats and sandflies. A more pestilential hole cannot be conceived; and yet people traverse this district, and sleep here at all seasons of the year with impunity.
Leaving them they spent a wretched night on the shores of a lake, deluged with rain and tormented with sandflies and mosquitoes the former being perhaps the greatest pests of the country. Soon the guides grew tired of their mode of travelling, and the allowance of provisions had to be still further reduced.
The season of the year in which the natives catch the greatest quantity of frogs and freshwater shellfish is when the swamps are nearly dried up; these animals then bury themselves in holes in the mud, and the native women with their long sticks and long thin arms, which they plunge up to the shoulder in the slime, manage to drag them out; at all seasons however they catch some of these animals, but in summer a whole troop of native women may be seen paddling about in a swamp, slapping themselves to kill the mosquitoes and sandflies, and every now and then plunging their arms down into the mud, and dragging forth their prey.
Then it appeared that the coarse grass of the park had bred innumerable black flies, and that we had our work cut out for us. The question of flies using that, to a woodsman, eminently connotive word in its wide embracement of mosquitoes, sandflies, deer-flies, black flies, and midges is one much mooted in the craft. On no subject are more widely divergent ideas expressed.
"Drat the little beggars," he was muttering as he kept on digging at his leg, "they sure do beat anything I ever run acrost in all my wanderin's. It ain't so bad to be slappin' at pesky skeeters, 'cause I'm used to sich bloodsuckers; but sandflies, and' jiggers, an' redbugs make a combination that'd be hard to beat."
I knew he had lately been offered a situation in the Great Sahara, where lions and sandflies made the hermit-life peculiarly attractive and difficult, and had gone to Africa to take possession, so I thought I would look in and see how the atmosphere of this den agreed with its reputation. My surprise was great: the place was newly swept and scoured. Then there was another surprise.
In summer a whole troop of females may be seen paddling about in a swamp, slapping themselves to kill the mosquitoes and sandflies, and every now and then plunging their arms down into the mud, and dragging forth their prey. Sometimes one of these women may be seen with ten or twelve pounds' weight of frogs in her bag.
They were lying on the beach after bathing, trying to protect their bare and blistered legs from the sandflies. Laura, flat on her back, had spread a towel over hers; Pin sat Turk fashion with her legs beneath her and fought the flies with her hands.
As Dusky Bay presented many advantages to our navigators, so it was attended with some disagreeable circumstances. There were great numbers of small black sandflies, which were troublesome to a degree that our commander had never experienced before. Another evil arose from the continual quantity of rain that occurred in the bay.
The dampness of the marshes was poison to white men, and earwigs, ants, mosquitoes, sandflies, beetles, scorpions, snakes, and every imaginable insect and reptile seemed to do their best to make things unpleasant for him. The turf was full of prickly grass seeds; the long grass cut the fingers to the bone if people tried to pick it. The very fruit was bitter and poisonous.
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