Remembering tales about sleeping sickness, and suspicion of conveying it said to rest on a tetse fly that crossed its wings, I went out the following day and walked many miles east-ward, taking with me the only two sober villagers I could find.  They came willingly enough for five miles, thinking, I suppose, that I intended to follow Will’s example and kill some more meat (although, as I did not take the rifle with me, they were not guilty of much dead-weight reasoning).

At the bank of the fifth stream we came to they stopped, and refused to go another yard.  Thinking they were merely lusting after the meat and beer in the village, I took a stick to drive them across the stream in front of me, but they dodged in terror and ran back home as if the devil had been after them.

I crossed the stream and continued forward alone about another mile toward a fairly large village visible between great blue boulders with cactus dotted all about.  There was the usual herd of cattle grazing near at hand, but the place had an unaccountable forlorn look, and the small boy standing on an ant-hill to watch the cattle seemed too listless to be curious, and too indifferent to run away.  The big brown tetse flies, that crossed their wings when resting, were everywhere, making no noise at all, but announcing themselves every once in a while by a bite on the back of the hand that stung like a whip-lash.  They seemed to have special liking for coat-sleeves, and a dozen of them were generally riding on each side of me.  One could drive them off, but they came back at once, as horse-flies do when poked off with a whip.

When I drew near the village nobody came out to look at me, which was suspicious in itself.  Nobody shouted.  Nobody blocked the way, or dragged thorn-bushes across the gateway.  There were black men and women there, sitting in the shadows of the eaves, who looked up and stared at me—­men and women too intent on sitting still to care whether their skins were glossy—­unoiled, unwashed, unfed, by the look of them—­skeletons clothed in leather and dust, desiring death, but cruelly denied it.

One man, thin as a wisp of smoke, rushed at me from the shadow of a hut door and tried to bite my leg.  The merest push sent him rolling over, and there he lay, too overcome by inertia to move another inch, his arm uplifted in the act of self-defense.  Nobody else in the village stirred.  There were more huts than people, more kites on the roofs than huts.  Some of the littlest children played in the hut doors, but nearly all of them were listless like the grown folk.  The only sign of normal activity was the big black earthen jars that witnessed that the women performed part at least of their daily round by bringing water from the lake.

I returned late that afternoon, walking, as it were, out of a belt of tetse flies.  On one side of a narrow stream they were thick together; to the west of it there were scarcely any, although the wind blew from east to west.