Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/302
They caught tsetse flies on Crocodile Point. See the fantastic picture of them there, gravely toiling at a job fit for a hundred searchers to take ten years at. Bruce sits with his wife on the sand in the middle of a ring of bare-backed paddlers who squat round them. The tsetses buzz down onto the paddlers' backs. The fly-boys pounce on them, hand them to Bruce, who snips off their heads, waves the buzzing devils away from his own neck, determines the sex of each fly caught, dissects out its intestine—and smears the blood in them on thin glass slides. . . .
Washouts, most of these experiments; but one day, in the blood of a native cow from the Island of Kome, not hurting that cow at all, but ready to be sucked up by the tsetse for stabbing under the skin of the first man it meets, Bruce found the trypanosome of sleeping sickness. He sent out word, and presently a lot of bulls and cows were driven up the hill to Mpumu by order of Apolo Kagwa. Bruce, himself in the thick of it, directed dusty fly-bitings of these cattle—yes! there was no doubt the sleeping-sickness virus could live in them. Then there were scuffles in the hot pens with fresh-caught antelope; they were thrown, they were tied, Bruce held dying monkeys across their flanks, and let harmless tsetses, bred in the laboratory, feed on the monkey and then on the buck. . . .
"The fly country around the Lake shore will have to be cleared of antelope, too, as well as men—before the Kivu become harmless," Bruce said at last to Apolo.
And now the sleeping death really disappeared from the shores of Lake Victoria Nyanza.
VIII
The ten thousand smaller microbe hunters who work at lesser jobs to-day, as well as the dozen towering ones whose adventures this book tells, all of them have to take some risk of death. But if the ten thousand smaller microbe hunters of to-day could by some chemistry be changed into death-