With the steamer came luxury once more, and a note for me, directing us to put into a village a little farther north, and bring down a giraffe, which had been presented when of a moderate size to Lord Kitchener as a peace offering by the inhabitants when the Sirdar had gone up the river to meet Marchand at Fashoda over eighteen months before. The Sudan having been closed so long to naturalists and sportsmen, such an animal was worth round about £1000; the Sirdar had accepted it, and said he would send for it later. We flew down the river the time seemed desperately long. first day, doing nearly one I had grown a beautiful gingerhundred miles; the next day coloured beard as a protection we passed Fashoda, and the against mosquitoes, lived in south wind died away. Then shorts and shirt with the sleeves we met the north wind, and cut off at the shoulder, was as could only drift and pull, as brown as a native, and generthe boat with her one mast ally looked an unmitigated stepped well forward would blackguard ! not beat up to windward. Eventually, owing to the force of the wind, we could only drift by night, and constantly ran aground on the shoals in the dark. This was always a most unpleasant experience, as it necessitated getting over the side into the water and pushing till we got into deeper water again. Neither the men nor I liked it at all, as the danger from crocodiles was very real, and it was the mercy of Providence we were never attacked by them. Eventually we had to give up drifting by night, and be satisfied with making a few miles daily about dawn and dusk, when the wind subsided. Consequently we made very slow progress after the first 200 miles, ran short of rations, and became almost entirely dependent on what I shot. It took us a month to get to Goz Abu Guma, by which time I had expended all my ammunition, and most of us had got malaria. Luckily there was a Government telegraph station here, and the clerk had a good supply of rations, on which we lived till a steamer called a fortnight later. The heat was bad, I had no books, the fever bothered us a lot, and the We put in, and the head man coming on board, was clearly delighted when he heard I had come for the animal. I inspected him, and found him practically full-grown, and how he was to be accommodated on board was a problem. However, we cut a large section out of the upper deck of one of the barges to give him head room, railed up the end of the barge to form a big cage, and manhandled him into it with the aid of ropes. The rejoicing in the village at seeing the last of him was universal, and I learnt the reason. The Sirdar had given directions that great care was to be taken of the giraffe, and that he was to be supplied with anything he required to eat. He had then only just been captured, and would only consume milk. So on milk he was fed, and grew and thrived amazingly, till the supply became a serious matter. When I arrived, the villagers said he was drinking up all the milk they could provide and more, which they had great difficulty in procuring, as villages were few and far between, and no one had offered to pay for it! Accustomed to Egyptian rule, they considered it would be easier to draw water out of a stone than to get the price of milk for a giraffe out of the Government, and they were not far wrong! We got him down to Omdurman all right, and I also was glad to see the last of him, as I thought. But his adventures were not over. A few days later I got an order in the artillery lines at Halfaiyah, opposite to Omdurman, to take delivery of the giraffe on our bank, and convey him across the five miles of desert on our side to railhead opposite to Khartoum, where he was to be loaded on a specially prepared truck en route to Cairo. The staff officer sending the order evidently thought himself a bit of a wag, and added that as the Egyptian artillery were always so excellent, the problem of how to get the giraffe across could not be left in better hands, and he was quite confident it would present no difficulty! We improvised breast and VOL. CCXXI.-NO. MCCCXXXVI. breeching harness with dragropes attached, and a head collar with guiding ropes with fifty hefty Egyptian gunners manning them (quite sufficient to hold an elephant in leash !), and with a large tempting sheaf of green Indian corn carried just out of reach of his nose on a pole, we started him off. After a few ineffectual attempts to assert his own will, he resigned himself to the inevitable, and was safely landed up at the railway siding. Next morning he was loaded up into his cage truck with some difficulty, and began his railway journey with his supercilious head looking out over the top. So a All went well till he got to Assuan. Between that and Cairo there were one or two bridges over the line, which the giraffe could not negotiate with his head erect. second empty truck was placed on the train in front of his own, light tackles with pulleys were attached to the head collar, which he still wore, and to the front truck, and as a bridge was approached, his head was solemnly hauled down hand over hand until His Eminence could safely be taken under the obstruction. He arrived in Cairo all correct, where a giraffe had not been received at the Zoo for many years. I used to take a special interest in him, and visited him when passing through Cairo. He turned out a very fine specimen, no doubt largely due to his upbringing on milk! I used even to think that he recognised me! G THE PROTECTOR. BY BARTIMEUS. "Oaths, insult, filth, and monstrous blasphemies..." PERHAPS it would be exaggeration to say that we hurled all these things at them. We certainly refrained from throwing filth, because there was a notice posted in the changing-hut which forbade defilement of the Reservoir water under a penalty of five pounds. But we did try both wet and dry flies, three different kinds of spinning minnows, and a local lure which the Head Keeper called a "twodecker," and on any other water than Blagdon ought to guarantee its user, if not a fish, certainly fourteen days without the option. Let us, however, collect ourselves and start at the beginning. the bars of the dock-gates to one of a crowd of four or five hundred strikers sullenly assembled there, to go and dig some lug-worms for bait . . . The General Strike dragged on, and we nursed our impatience in the monastic seclusion of the docks while Industrial Unrest raged furiously without. To be precise, its raging consisted in donning its Sunday clothes and shivering in disconsolate groups in a biting north-easterly wind at the street corners. The Navigating Officer passed the time in luring University undergraduates from their labours in the holds of grain and banana ships, bringing them on board on the pretence of giving them hot baths and drinks, and tactfully leading the conversation round to the fishing possibilities of their parents' demesnes. The Gunnery Lieutenant put on his Whale Island gaiters, cadged a moribund Ford lorry from Casabianca, and proposed to convert it, embellished by the ship's secondary armament, into a tank. This project being discouraged, he armed the seamen-guard to the teeth, posted them in a cordon round a block of offices enshrining a "black-leg" typist with shingled hair and skirts of surpassing brevity, and beguiled the tedium of the long days by driving the moribund Ford round the cordon, "seeing," as he phrased it, "that everything was all quiet on the Potomac." the The importation of beer and a cinema and the conversion of an empty cargo-shed into a wet-canteen furnished all the simple needs of the ship's company. Out of sight of the boundless ocean, consuming beer at cost price in their leisure hours under the wistful gaze of Mary Pickford and Jackie Coogan, they were content that the General Strike should last for ever, and sang hymns to the glory of Mr B, the local irreconcilable. Touched by the plight of these hapless ones, a local amateur dramatic society descended upon the cargo-shed, and organised nightly concerts with appropriate songs and recitations. ing spirit of beating swords into ploughshares, proposed to drive the three of us to Blagdon in the Ford lorry. This was negatived on the grounds of comfort; also Casabianca had other uses for it. It remained for him to go home and fetch his own car, in which, on the appointed day, we fared forth. To anybody insensitive to the charm of the English countryside in May I would recommend ten days' durance within the walls of a stagnant commercial docks. I did not realise before how much one could miss trees. You do not miss them at sea in the same way. Perhaps there is compensation for the eye in the curves and colour of the waves; and the changing surface, with its rhythm and suggestion of restrained energy, is a good substitute for organic growth. Anyhow, our eyes feasted, as the phrase goes, on the trees during that hour's drive, while the road skirted the river gorge and the parks of local magnates, and the oaks and sycamores and elms, with here and there a copper beech, were like surf flung skyward from a roller bursting against a cliff. Delicious greens and purples, and in places an almost autumnal delicacy of russet, where the April frosts had nipped the young leaves. The car wheeled round a bend, and Blagdon came in sight. A chilly wind from the north-east distressed its surface. "I know a lake where the fish rise best in a north-east wind," said the G.L. as he swung his freight into little avenue leading to the changing-hut. "It's in Ireland," he added mournfully. We made our way to the changing-hut, and introduced ourselves to the Head Keeper with the humility of newcomers to a famous stretch of water in the presence of its oracle and sovereign. 66 Would we get any fish?" the pathetic query levelled at so many keepers in the touching, almost superstitious, belief that in the answer lies all the fortunes of the day. Had the Head Keeper been Irish I don't doubt that he would have overwhelmed us with affirmative assurances. However, he is Scotch, and his answer was to walk to the door of the shed and close it against the wintry blast. "It's a snell wind," he murmured, and our hearts sank. The oracle had spoken. We climbed silently into our waders and put up our rods. In turn we submitted our flybooks for inspection and advice. The wise, grey, crow-footed eyes scanned their contents, and a fly was indicated with a forefinger here and there. But we somehow felt that it was more as a concession to our enthusiasm than in any spirit of optimism that he made the selection. Finally, we fared forth to our destiny, pausing in the doorway for a last backward glance at the painting of the record trout that hangs on the |