Never did I see a more dreary and depressing scene. Miles on miles of
quagmire, varied only by bright green strips of comparatively solid
ground, and by deep and sullen pools fringed with tall rushes, in which
the bitterns boomed and the frogs croaked incessantly: miles on miles of
it without a break, unless the fever fog can be called a break. The only
life in this great morass was that of the aquatic birds, and the animals
that fed on them, of both of which there were vast numbers. Geese,
cranes, ducks, teal, coot, snipe, and plover swarmed all around us, many
being of varieties that were quite new to me, and all so tame that one
could almost have knocked them over with a stick. Among these birds I
especially noticed a very beautiful variety of painted snipe, almost the
size of a woodcock, and with a flight more resembling that bird's than
an English snipe's. In the pools, too, was a species of small alligator
or enormous iguana, I do not know which, that fed, Billali told me, upon
the waterfowl, also large quantities of a hideous black water-snake, of
which the bite is very dangerous, though not, I gathered, so deadly as a
cobra's or a puff adder's.
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