OCR Text |
Show BACK FROM JOURNEY I PIC1 J1GLES American Describes Experience Experi-ence With Tse Tse Fly and Wild Animals. W. W. W. Roberta, known to nearly every civilized man in South Africa as "Billy" Roberts, is a visitor in Salt Lake City and is registered at the Hotel Utah. Mr. Roberts, to use his own ex-! ex-! presaion, is again visiting the west, ''God's country," after a somewhat prolonged stay in Uganda, South Africa, Afri-ca, where he has beon flirting with death through the medium of either the deadly tse tse fly or the equally none too friendly fangs of a python. Mr. Roberts has mauy friends in the inter-mountain inter-mountain country and expects to renew old acquaintances before he continues on his journey to the coast. Since last here his "vacation" took him exploring explor-ing in Africa, but he returns to the west once more in the interest of Thad Davis, ink manufacturer. "There are many subjects of interest," inter-est," said Mr. Roberts, "that armcal to some people, but there is one subject that always appeals to everybody, and that is anything connected with or relating re-lating to that far-distant country famed and fabled in mystery and allegory, the dark continent of Africa." Mr. Roberts recently returned from Africa, where he has spent more than a year as naturalist and historian of a scientific and photographic expedition headed by J. C. Hemment, an explorer, journalist, author and photographer of international fame, and the man who made the Rainev pictures for Paul J. Rainey of Cleveland, a series of motion pictures that startled and amazed the civilized world. "The expedition extended into the deep in terior of Uganda, central Africa," Afri-ca," said Mr. Roberts, "and the hardships, hard-ships, privations and dangers encountered encoun-tered in quest of unusual scenes in this equatorial country were such that but few men, no matter what their physical physi-cal resources nay be, are able to stand the roughing for any great length of time. I will never 'forget my experience experi-ence in the fly belt, where the deadly tse tse fly is prevalent. The fly, about the size of a common house fly, carries car-ries the tiniest death bite known to science. Tt is a blood-sucking fly and conveys the virus into the blood of the victim and there is no cure, so far as is known, for those who have been in-nocnlated. in-nocnlated. The symptoms are slow and insidious. At first there is a trembling somnolence, then vertigo appears and finally the victim passes into a state of torpor or coma, and then the final result, death. Jt has been recorded that more than 600,000 deaths on the archipelago of Victoria Nyansa were attributed at-tributed to the bite of this fly, the pest of the jungle. j "My good friend, Jack Hemment, had . a terrible siege of it following a bite ! by one of these tse tse flies. At inter-1 inter-1 vals he raved like a maniac and we had to watch bim closely day and night. We kept putting hot fomentations on him every ten minutes. We sent native runners to Butiaba, five days' journev away, to summon physicians, but they could not get away. Finally, Jack became be-came so feeble that we had "to rig up a stretcher and carry him through ihe jungle, following the elephant trails. His temperature was at times as much as 103. When we reached Butiaba he collapsed and begged us to let him die. We revived him with stimulants. He begged us often to let him die in the wilderness, but he was of that type of man that could not well be spared, so, aided by his extraordinary grit, wa managed to pull him through." Mr. Roberts told of a terrifying experience ex-perience he had with an eighteen-foot python when he was out alone with a small hand camera. He disturbed the python 's rest and it made for him. He sprinted round and round the brush, blowing his whistle for help, and he was just about ready to give up when one of his companions came along and put a bullet through the snake, which finished him. When the question was put to Mr. Roberts whether he would care to make another expedition into that wild r-oun-trv he sook his head and grimly replied, "Not so you can notice it." |