ky promontory with a clump of
thick jungle behind it. Fear began to get its work in, until the
thought came that what he most desired was to make me afraid; then I
managed to summon sufficient contempt for him and his tribe to regain
my nerve and once more almost enjoy the promenade.

He halted the hammock bearers at a spot about three hundred yards away
from the promontory and, leaving them standing there, turned inland
with a hand on my arm to give me support and direction. We followed a
path that was fairly well marked out and trodden, but rough, and
several times I should have fallen but for his help. My legs still
refused any sort of strenuous duty.

"The staff surgeon at this station is a man of ideas," he announced as
we rounded a big rock and passed down a narrow glade in the jungle.
"He is original. He is not like some of our official fools. He
studies."

I refused to seem curious, and walked beside him in silence.

"He studies sleeping sickness. If he can find the key to the solution
of that scourge it will mean promotion for him. He has noticed that
the sleeping sickness is always at its worst beside the lake, and
putting two and two together like a sensible man has reached the
conclusion that the disease may be propagated in some way in the blood
of these things."

We emerged into a clearing in which a pool more than a hundred yards
long and nearly as many wide was formed naturally by a hollow in the
surface of a great sheet of granite. The pool was fed by a trickle of
water from a jumble of rocks at one end. At the other end the bottom
of the pond sloped upward gradually, so that a ramp of smooth rock was
formed, emerging out of shallow water. A stone wall had been built
about three feet high to enclose that end of the pond, and all the way
along both sides the granite had been broken and chipped until the
edges were sheer and unclimbable.

"Look!" he said, pointing.

I looked and grew sick. On the ramp, half in the water and half out
lay about a hundred crocodiles basking in the sun, their yellow eyes
all open. They were aware of us, for they began to move slowly higher
out of water as if they expected something.

"You see that post?" asked Schillingschen.

The stump of a dead tree that he referred to stood up nearly straight
out of a crack in the rock, and a few yards above water level. The
crocodiles all lay nose toward it, some of them twelve or fourteen feet
long, some smaller,