06

A HIPPOPOTAMUS HUNT

I

1. After a journey of several days across a tract of country near the river Nile, we camped for the night in a patch of scrub a little larger and greener than those surrounding it. We were then about sixty miles to the south-west of Kassala . Next day we made a slight deviation in our journey, in order to visit an Arab encampment. It proved to be the camp of a hunting party.They had journeyed to the “great river” to get hippopotamuses´ skins, which were to be made into shields, or to be sold at Kassala.

2. After the sheik had offered us some coffee and food, the conversation turned into the one channel of interest to this race—the use of arms and the management of the horse. Among the weapons shown us was the spear used in hunting the hippopotamus. It had a large, heavy head of soft steel about eighteen inches long, fitted with a single stout barb.The shaft was a light bamboo rod about ten feet long. Attached to the iron head was a light but very strong rope twenty feet long; and at the free end of the rope was a float, shaped like an oval football and about the samesize, made of a peculiarly light wood which they called ambatch.

3. “We will now show you the hippopotamus, ” said the sheik.

In a few minutes about thirty of us were on horseback. We pressed on to the river. The current ran strongly in the middle, and the banks were irregular, as if violently washed by the action of the great spring floods. In the coves were quiet pools studded with rocks. We left our horses in care of some of the men. The great hunter of the party, Jali by name, then put on his hunting costume, which means that he discarded most of his clothes, and braced a leathern belt around his waist. He must have been seventy years of age. He was more than six feet high, and as straight as an arrow. With his grey hair and bronzed skin, he was a picture worth looking at.

4. Seizing a spear, he examined it in every part. Then he withdrew the bamboo shaft from the head, thrust the head through his girdle, and coiled the rope on his left arm, with the float over his shoulder. Thusequipped , and using the shaft as a pole, he leaped from boulder to boulder with the activity of a boy, until he reached the deep-water entrance to a large pool.As he leaped to the last boulder, two hippopotamuses arose from its shadow with a snort and a rush and swam rapidly through the passage into the open river.

5. “They were awake; we were too soon after their meal. But I wished to be certain of having time to find one to-day, ” said the sheik, as we proceeded to another pool about half a mile below. As we clambered over some rocks, and through a gorge, at the bottom of which was a small pool, I saw the immense head of a hippopotamus lying close to a perpendicular rock that formed a wall twenty feet long, running at right angles to the river. The old man, Jali, had been walking along just in front of me; and as I touched him, and pointed down to the animal´s head, the gravity of his face was lifted as a curtain rises: he looked forty years younger in an instant. Hurriedly telling us in Arabic to halt and remain quiet, he climbed up the side of the gorge again and disappeared.

6. In about five minutes the sheik touched my hand, and directed his eyes to the middle of the river. There, in the rushing current, was the old man, quietly carried along by it, with only half his head above water, and the large float bobbing about in his wake . As he neared the jutting wall of rock, he could not have been thirty feet from the half-asleep river-horse, and his head sank lower and lower until it was almost submerged .

7. “Surely he, an old man, can never breast that current to gain the rock, ” I said in a whisper to the chief. But the sheik only smiled, and made a motion to be silent. As the veteran hunter passed the end of the rock, he turned on his side, and after a fierce strugglewith the water, gained a footing on the lower part of the rock, where, hidden from our view, he rested until he had regained his breath.

8. Then his hand appeared on the top, next his head, and then, by sheer muscular force marvellous in so old a man, he raised himnone to the very top of the rock. He fitted the shaft of the spear into the head; cast clear the rope and float; rose slowly to his full height, his long, sinewy arm raised; and advanced to the edge of the pool. The sun behind him suddenly cleared a large belt of cloud that for a few minutes had obscured it, and cast his shadow forward right in front of the hippopotamus. Slowly the animal sank. The old Arab did not move; no statue of bronze was ever more rigid than this old river-king, with his dripping body and upraised spear, just risen from the fl ood

WORD SPELLING

WORD EXERCISE

1. Give a list of nouns in -ity, formed from adjectives, as activity .

2. Make sentences showing the use of the words Arab, Arabic, and Arabian, as adjectives.

3. Give a list of words formed from the stem of submerge, with various prefi xes and terminations