sing him we got nothing to eat; and, as usual, we
gave a cloth in return. In reference to the hippopotamus he would make
no demand, but said he would take what we chose to give him. The men
gorged themselves with meat for two days, and cut large quantities into
long narrow strips, which they half-dried and half-roasted on wooden
frames over the fire. Much game is taken in this neighbourhood in
pitfalls. Sharp-pointed stakes are set in the bottom, on which the game
tumbles and gets impaled. The natives are careful to warn strangers of
these traps, and also of the poisoned beams suspended on the tall trees
for the purpose of killing elephants and hippopotami. It is not
difficult to detect the pitfalls after one's attention has been called to
them; but in places where they are careful to carry the earth off to a
distance, and a person is not thinking of such things, a sudden descent
of nine feet is an experience not easily forgotten by the traveller. The
sensations of one thus instantaneously swallowed up by the earth are
peculiar. A momentary suspension of consciousness is followed by the
rustling sound of a shower of sand and dry grass, and the half-bewildered
thought of where he is, and how he came into darkness. Reason awakes to
assure him that he must have come down through that small opening of
daylight overhead, and that he is now where a hippopotamus ought to have
been. The descent of a hippopotamus pitfall is easy, but to get out
again into the upper air is a work of labour. The sides are smooth and
treacherous, and the cross reeds, which support the covering, break in
the attempt to get out by clutching them. A cry from the depths is
unheard by those around, and it is only by repeated and most desperate
efforts that the buried alive can regain the upper world. At Tette we
are told of a white hunter, of unusually small stature, who plumped into
a pit while stalking a guinea-fowl on a tree. It was the labour of an
entire forenoon to get out; and he was congratulating himself on his
escape, and brushing off the clay from his clothes, when down he went
into a second pit, which happened, as is often the case, to be close
beside the first, and it was evening before he could work himself out of
_that_.

Elephants and buffaloes seldom return to the river by the same path on
two successive nights, they become so apprehensive of danger from this
human art. An old elephant will walk in advance of the herd, and