Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/291

Presently, two years after Ladysmith, he became stronger than they—and they came asking him to hunt microbes. . . .

For death was abroad on the shores of Lake Victoria Nyanza, in Central Africa, on the Equator. It crept, it jumped, it kept popping up in new villages, it was in a way a very merciful death—though slow—for it was without pain, turning from a fitful fever into an unconquerable laziness strange to see in the busy natives of the lake shore; it passed, this death, from lethargy into a ridiculous sleepiness that made the mouths of the negroes fall open while they ate; it went at last from such a drowsiness into a delicious coma—no waking from this!—and into a horrible unnatural coldness that merged with the chill of the grave. Such was the African sleeping sickness. In a few years it had killed hundreds of thousands of the people of Uganda, it had sent brave missionaries to meet their God, and English colonial administrators home to their final slumber. It was turning the most generous soil on earth back into an unproductive preserve for giraffes and hyenas. The British Colonial Office was alarmed; shareholders began to fear for their dividends; natives—those who were left—began to leave their villages of shaggy, high-pitched, thatch-roofed huts. And the scientists and doctors?

Well, the scientists and doctors were working at it. Up till now the wisest ones were as completely ignorant of what was this sleeping death as the blackest trader in bananas was ignorant. No one could tell how it stole from a black father to his neighbor's dusky pickaninnies. But now the Royal Society sent out a commission made up of three searchers; they sailed for Uganda and began researches with the blood and spinal fluid of unhappy black men doomed with this drowsy death.

They groped; they sweat in the tropic heat; they formed different opinions: one was pretty sure a curious long worm that he found in the black men's blood was the cause of this