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he discovered the germ of an important disease? Here he met (at last God was good to him) His Excellency, the Honorable Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson, Governor of Natal and Zululand, et cetera, et cetera. Together these two adventurers saw visions and made plans. His Excellency knew nothing about, microbes and had perhaps never heard of Theobald Smith—but he had a colonial administrator's dream of Africa buzzing with prosperity under the Union Jack. Bruce cared no fig for expansion of the Empire, but he knew there must be viruses sneaking from beast to beast and man to man on the stingers of bugs and flies. He wanted (and so did Mrs. Bruce) to investigate strange diseases in impossible places.
It was then that he, only a brash captain, went to the majestic Director-General, and I have just told how he was demolished. But even Directors-General cannot remember the uppish wishes of all of their pawns and puppets; directors may propose, but adroit wire-pulling sometimes disposes, and presently in 1894, Surgeon-Major David Bruce and Mrs. Bruce are in Natal, traveling by ox-team ten miles a day towards Ubombo in Zululand. The temperature in the shade of their double-tent often reached 106; swarms of tsetse flies escorted them, harassed them, flopped on them with the speed of express trains and stung them like little adders; they were howled at by hyenas and growled at by lions. . . . They spent part of every night scratching tick bites. . . . But Bruce and his wife, the two of them, were the First British Nagana Commission to Zululand. So they were happy.
They were commanded to find out everything about the disease called nagana—the pretty native name for an unknown something that made great stretches of South Africa into a desolate place, impossible to farm in, dangerous to hunt big game in, suicidal to travel in. Nagana means "depressed and low in spirits." Nagana steals into fine horses and makes their coats stare and their hair fall out; while the fat of these horses melts away nagana grows watery pouches on their bellies and causes a thin rheum to drip from their noses; a milky film