Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 1.djvu/71

 remarkable inhabitants of this watery region is the balæniceps rex, a curious long-legged aquatic bird with grey plumage, which when perched on a termite’s hillock looks from a distance like a Nuer fisherman.

From the time when the envoys of Nero failed to penetrate the sea of floating vegetation, explorers of the Nile have been frequently arrested by this obstacle. During the latter half of the present century most of them have had to force their way through the tangled masses, and one of the channels thus formed by Miss Tinne’s steamer still bears the name of Maya Signora. During the seven years from 1870 to 1877 the river was completely blocked, obliging all travellers to continue their journey by the Bahr-ez-Zaraf. Many were detained for weeks and months on these pestiferous waters, over which hover dense clouds of mosquitoes. Here Gessi was arrested in 1880 with five hundred soldiers and a large number of liberated slaves, and three months elapsed before an Egyptian flotilla, under Marno, was able to rescue them by opening a passage from below. Devoured by the insects, wasted by fever, and reduced to live on wild herbs and the dead bodies of their unfortunate comrades, most of the captives found a grave in the surrounding swamps, and nearly all the survivors perished of exhaustion soon after. Gessi himself outlived the disaster only a few months. To the lagoon of No must be attributed those “ green waters” noticed at Cairo during the early days of June, when the stream, charged with vegetable