as clearly as though they had been scooped out of the mud with a trowel, the hoofs of buffalo as large as the shoe of a cart horse, and the arrow-like marks of the antelope, some in dainty little Vs, others measuring three inches across, and three inches from the base to the point.  They came from every direction, down the bank and out of the river; and crossed and recrossed, and beneath the fresh prints that had been made that morning at sunrise, were those of days before rising up sharply out of the sun-dried clay, like bas-reliefs in stucco.  I had gone ashore in a state of mind so skeptical that I was as surprised as Crusoe at the sight of footprints.  It was as though the boy who did not believe in fairies suddenly stumbled upon them sliding down the moonbeams.  One felt distinctly apologetic—­as though uninvited he had pushed himself into a family gathering.  At the same time there was the excitement of meeting in their own homes the strange peoples I had seen only in the springtime, when the circus comes to New York, in the basement of Madison Square Garden, where they are our pitiful prisoners, bruising their shoulders against bars.  Here they were monarchs of all they surveyed.  I was the intruder; and, looking down at the marks of the great paws and delicate hoofs, I felt as much out of place as would a grizzly bear in a Fifth Avenue club.  And I behaved much as would the grizzly bear.  I rushed back for my rifle intent on killing something.

The sun had just set; the moon was shining faintly:  it was the moment the beasts of the jungle came to the river to drink.  Anfossi, although he had spent three years in the Congo and had three years’ contract still to work out, was as determined to kill something as was the tenderfoot from New York.

Sixty yards from the stern of the Deliverance was the basin I had discovered; at an equal distance from her bow, a stream plunged into the river.  Anfossi argued the hippos would prefer to drink the clear water of the stream, to the muddy water of the basin, and elected to watch at the stream.  I carried a deck chair to the edge of my basin and placed it in the shadow of the trees.  Anfossi went into our cabin for his rifle.  At that exact moment a hippopotamus climbed leisurely out of the river and plunged into the stream.  One of the soldiers on shore saw him and rushed for the boat.  Anfossi sent my boy on the jump for me and, like a gentleman, waited until I had raced the sixty yards.  But when we reached the stream there was nothing visible but the trampled grass and great holes in the mud and near us in the misty moonlight river something that puffed and blew slowly and luxuriously, as would any fat gentleman who had been forced to run for it.  Had I followed Anfossi’s judgment and gone along the bank sixty yards ahead, instead of sixty yards astern of the Deliverance, at the exact moment at which I sank into my deck chair, the hippo would have emerged at my feet.  It is even betting as to which of us would have been the more scared.