TROD ON CROCODILE

Southland Times, Issue 18968, 15 June 1923, Page 11

TROD ON CROCODILE

PEER’S QUEER LANDING. FROM RIVER STEAMER. Lord Dewar returned to London recently from a long and interesting business tour through the Sudan to the borders of the Congo and Uganda., “If I had never done any big game shooting before,” he said to a pressman, “I might not be quite so reluctant as I find myself at present to talk about my adventures. “The mere slaughter of big or rare animals does not appeal to me as much as the observation of their ways of life, and the thrill-and joy we get from living in the African bush. “Its a wondeful thing to be in touch with primitive man—the cheerfullest chaps on earth. Men as nude as nature, but you may depend as much on the simple handshake of the savage as on the wagging of a dog’s tail. “Their morality exceeds that of Western civilisation—rwhere ‘divorces are arranged and will shortly take place.’ “A missionary I met told me his great difficulty was how to convince them why he left his country to live among them. One chief said to him : How can your God be so wonderfully good as you say he is. You have one wire; I have 15. I have 203 head of cattle; you have one cow. In your country there are no mosquitoes, yet your God lets you come amongst us to be fly-tormented. “It is cattle they worship. They never kill an ox and never sell one. In cattle are their Consols. “I suppose, however, I shall have to .ell you a big game story. It has the merit of being true. “One daybreak after I had secured a specimen in the Sudan of the Mrs Grey waterbuck (one of the trophies I went to Africa to secure) I was surprised, on stepping off the steamer, that the dead elephant jraa* did not ‘give’ under my feet. I found myself walking Blondin-like, on the back of sleeping 16ft crocodile! “The rentile was more scared than I was apparently, lashed out with his tail, and made tracks for the water. In do:ng so he landed on the deck of our steamer, where, after careering about, he slid off into a ibarge\ stampeeding six donkeys, some sheep and goats and a few natives, and ended by turning a tremendous somersault into the muddy mater.”