Thinking black; 22 years without a break in the long grass of Central ...

BLACK MAN = BLACK MANNERS 465
Farther along a bull-hippo charged me in a dug-out in
his best swashbuckler style. Waited for him quietly, as
in two or three plunging springs he came on, bowling and
bellowing in rage ; then got a bullet in through his open
mouth. A momentary and momentous hush, then up he
comes with a suffocating, explosive noise, spouting blood.
Anon, taking the whole Thames- at-Westminster-Bridge
width of the Lualaba, he floundered and writhed in his
death-struggle, lashing the placid water into foam. The
final act was to throw himself theatrically up in
the air, then, with a sucking swirl, he sank like a
stone. The curious touch about it all is that these
hardy blacks are naked to the blast, the idea being that,
as they must get wet, a cold clammy calico clinging to
their body is worse than a natural and normal nudity.
In fact, these droll Shila folk take this matter of dress
so seriously that they have worked out at a solution
exactly the opposite to ours. For the same man who
fishes in jpuris naturalibus can be seen, under broiling
vertical rays, sporting two blankets, our nude fishing
friend being now rolled up like a huge sausage in his
coils of calico.
A smile got the better of me when old Nyemba began
to speak seriously of '' his goats," meaning the local
school of hippos. This note of proprietorship in his
possessive pronoun was smile-provoking when one re-
flected that the said hippos claimed old Nyemba 's fields
so very much as theirs : does not each hippo sup on his
five bushels of vegetables per night without asking the