side, where there are no inhabitants. The drought drives
all the game to the river to drink. An hour's walk on the right bank,
morning or evening, reveals a country swarming with wild animals: vast
herds of pallahs, many waterbucks, koodoos, buffaloes, wild pigs, elands,
zebras, and monkeys appear; francolins, guinea-fowls, and myriads of
turtledoves attract the eye in the covers, with the fresh spoor of
elephants and rhinoceroses, which had been at the river during the night.
Every few miles we came upon a school of hippopotami, asleep on some
shallow sandbank; their bodies, nearly all out of the water, appeared
like masses of black rock in the river. When these animals are hunted
much, they become proportionably wary, but here no hunter ever troubles
them, and they repose in security, always however taking the precaution
of sleeping just above the deep channel, into which they can plunge when
alarmed. When a shot is fired into a sleeping herd, all start up on
their feet, and stare with peculiar stolid looks of hippopotamic
surprise, and wait for another shot before dashing into deep water. A
few miles below Chikumbula's we saw a white hippopotamus in a herd. Our
men had never seen one like it before. It was of a pinkish white,
exactly like the colour of the Albino. It seemed to be the father of a
number of others, for there were many marked with large light patches.
The so-called _white_ elephant is just such a pinkish Albino as this
hippopotamus. A few miles above Kariba we observed that, in two small
hamlets, many of the inhabitants had a similar affection of the skin. The
same influence appeared to have affected man and beast. A dark coloured
hippopotamus stood alone, as if expelled from the herd, and bit the
water, shaking his head from side to side in a most frantic manner. When
the female has twins, she is said to kill one of them.

We touched at the beautiful tree-covered island of Kalabi, opposite where
Tuba-mokoro lectured the lion in our way up. The ancestors of the people
who now inhabit this island possessed cattle. The tsetse has taken
possession of the country since "the beeves were lifted." No one knows
where these insects breed; at a certain season all disappear, and as
suddenly come back, no one knows whence. The natives are such close
observers of nature, that their ignorance in this case surprised us. A
solitary hippopotamus had selected the little bay in which we landed, and
where t