Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 220, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 October 1917 — IN AFRICAN JUNGLE [ARTICLE]

IN AFRICAN JUNGLE

/British Aviator Relates Experience of Four Days. Forced to Abandon Machine, He Had to Make Hie Way Through Almost stant Fear of Death. Horrible experiences of a British aviator who came down In an East African jungle are described by him in a letter just received by a relative at "London. The aviator, Lieut G. Garrood, went up to bomb a German ambush on the Rufljl river, but through engine trouble had to descend In the bush, the machine landing with broken propeller in a bog. It took him four days to make his way to a place of safety. He tells how in the dusk he was confronted with an ugly black animal about four feet high with vicious tusks. He climbed a tree and prepared to put in the night there. Later he opened his eyes and saw something like two green electric bulbs about 30 feet from the tree. They moved around in a circle. This continued for 45 minutes. He says: “The tension was unbearable. I wanted to scream, shout and yell all In one, but Instead I burst out with The Admiral’s Broom,’ and with a full-throated bass I roared out the three verses. No applause, but a reward —the leopard slunk away. Why had I not thought of it before? T went through my repertoire. I laughed as I finished Two Eyes of Grey.’ It seemed so ridiculous. Then I got on to hymns, remembered four verses of ‘O God, Our Help ip Ages Past,’ and sang the ‘Amen,’ too. The Next morning while swimming a river he passed seven yards from a crocodile’s mouth, but just reached the bank in time. Without food, or arms —his only weapon of defense his nails scissors—his progress through the awful bush was about 100 yards an hour. His clothing was in ribbons, and his flesh exposed to the thorns, sword grass and flies. He swam seven more rivers that day and sank down exhausted against a tree. He could hear a lion roaring about 500 yards away, and, somewhat nearer, the grunting of a hippopotamus. He continues: “Being exhausted, I more or less lost consciousness for perhaps half an hour or so. Nothing short of a hippo charging could have made me climb a tree. Am afraid life had little to offer about that time.” It was while lying here that the lieutenant had the annoying experience of surveying two large babboons, the size of a small man, quarreling over his trousers, now in threads, and among the tops of 40-foot trees. It was not until he had passed another horrible day and equally terrible night in the bush that he at last was picked up by some natives. “Their eyes seldom left me,” he adds. “Undoubtedly I was a strange sight—my legs bare and bleeding, my short vest sodden, dirty and torn, no trousers, of course, just a dirty sun helmet, a short stick in my right hand and with four days’ growth of heard* on my dirty face.”