Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/297

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
TRAIL OF THE TSETSE
269

Apolo Kagwa, to the Crocodile Point on the Lake shore where Kivu swarms so. Sit on the shore there with your feet in the water for five minutes. Don't keep off the flies—and I'll promise you'll be a dead man in two years!"

The bluff was perfect: "What then, is to be done, Colonel Bruce?" asked Apolo.

"Well, I must be dead sure I am right," Bruce told him. Then he showed Apolo a great map of Uganda. "If I'm right, where there is sleeping sickness—there we will find tsetse flies too. Where there are no tsetse—there should be no sleeping sickness."

So Bruce gave Apolo butterfly nets, and killing bottles, and envelopes; he gave directions about the exact way to set down all the facts, and he told how Apolo's darky minions might pinch the flies without getting stabbed themselves. "And then we will put our findings down on this map—and see if I'm right."

Apolo was nothing if not intelligent, and efficient. He said he would see what could be done. There were bows and amiable formalities. In a jiffy the black Prime Minister had called for his head chief, the Sekibobo, and all the paraphernalia, with rigid directions, went from the Sekibobo to the lesser headmen, and from them down to the canoe men—the wheels of that perfect feudal system were set going. . . .

Presently the envelopes began to pour in on Bruce and called him away from his monkey experiments. They cluttered the laboratory, they called him from his peerings into the intestines of tsetse flies where he looked for trypanosomes. Rapidly, with perfectly recorded facts—most of them set down by intelligent blacks and some by missionaries—the envelopes came in. It was a kind of scientific co-working you would have a hard time finding among white folks, even white medical men. Each envelope had a grubby assorted mess of biting flies, they had a dirty time sorting them, but every time they found a tsetse, a red-headed pin went into that spot on the map—and if a report of "sleeping sickness present" came with