to ascend a little tributary
brook coming down the wide flats from a cleft in the hills. This was
prettily named the Isiola, and, after the first mile or so, was not
big enough to afford the luxury of a jungle of its own. Its banks were
generally grassy and steep, its thickets few, and its little trees
isolated in parklike spaces. To either side of it, and almost at its
level, stretched plains, but plains grown with scattered brush and
shrubs so that at a mile or two one's vista was closed. But for all its
scant ten feet of width the Isiola stood upon its dignity as a stream.
We discovered that when we tried to cross. The men floundered waist-deep
on uncertain bottom; the syces received much unsympathetic comment
for their handling of the animals, and we had to get Billy over by a
melodramatic "bridge of life" with B., F., myself, and Memba Sasa in the
title roles.

Then we pitched camp in the open on the other side, sent the horses back
from the stream until after dark, in fear of the deadly tsetse fly, and
prepared to enjoy a good exploration of the neighbourhood. Whereupon
M'ganga rose up to his gaunt and terrific height of authority, stretched
forth his bony arm at right angles, and uttered between eight and nine
thousand commands in a high dynamic monotone without a single pause for
breath. These, supplemented by about as many more, resulted in (a) a
bridge across the stream, and (b) a banda.

A banda is a delightful African institution. It springs from nothing in
about two hours, but it takes twenty boys with a vitriolic M'ganga back
of them to bring it about. Some of them carry huge backloads of grass,
or papyrus, or cat-tail rushes, as the case may be; others lug in poles
of various lengths from where their comrades are cutting them by means
of their panga. A panga, parenthetically, is the safari man's substitute
for axe, shovel, pick, knife, sickle, lawn-mower, hammer, gatling
gun, world's library of classics, higher mathematics, grand opera, and
toothpicks. It looks rather like a machete with a very broad end and
a slight curved back. A good man can do extraordinary things with
it. Indeed, at this moment, two boys are with this apparently clumsy
implement delicately peeling some of the small thorn trees, from the
bared trunks of which they are stripping long bands of tough inner bark.

With these three raw materials-poles, withes, and grass-M'ganga and
his men set to work. They planted their corner and end