Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/284

spreads over their eyes and they go blind; they droop, and at last die—every last horse touched by the nagana dies. It was the same with cattle. Farmers tried to improve their herds by importing new stock; cows sent to them fat and in prime condition came miserably to their kraals—to die of nagana. Fat droves of cattle, sent away to far-off slaughter-houses, arrived there hairless, hidebound skeletons. There were strange belts of country through which it was death for animals to go. And the big game hunters! They would start into these innocent-seeming thickets with their horses and pack- mules; one by one—in certain regions mind you—their beasts wilted under them. When these hunters tried to hoof it back, sometimes they got home.

Bruce and Mrs. Bruce came at last to Ubombo—it was a settlement on a high hill, looking east toward the Indian Ocean across sixty miles of plain, and the olive-green of the mimosa thickets of this plain was slashed with the vivid green of glades of glass. On the hill they set up their laboratory; it consisted of a couple of microscopes, a few glass slides, some knives and syringes and perhaps a few dozen test-tubes—smart young medical students of to-day would stick up their noses at such a kindergarten affair! Here they set to work, with sick horses and cattle brought up from the plain below—for Providence had so arranged it that beasts could live on the barren hill of Ubombo, absolutely safe from nagana, but just let a farmer lead them down into the juicy grass of that fertile plain, and the chances were ten to one they would die of nagana before they became fat on the grass. Bruce shaved the ears of the horses and jabbed them with a scalpel, a drop of blood welled out and Mrs. Bruce, dodging their kicks, touched off the drops onto thin glass slides.

It was hot. Their sweat dimmed the lenses of their microscopes; they rejoiced in necks cramped from hours of looking; they joked about their red-rimmed eyes. They gave strange nicknames to their sick cows and horses, they learned to talk some Zulu. It was as if there were no Directors-General or