It was a long but a most interesting journey that the Doctor took from Fantippo to Lake Junganyika. It turned out that the turtle's home lay many miles inland in the heart of one of the wildest, most jungly parts of Africa.
 
The Doctor to leave Gub-Gub home this time and he took with him only Jip, Dab-Dab, Too-Too and Cheapside—who said he wanted a holiday and that his sparrow friends could now quite well carry on the city deliveries in his absence.
 
The great water snake began by taking the Doctor's party down the coast south for some forty or fifty miles. There they left the sea, entered the mouth of a river and started to journey inland. The canoe (with the snake swimming alongside it) was quite the best thing for this kind of travel so long as the river had water in it. But presently, as they went up it, the stream grew narrower and narrower. Till at last, like many rivers in tropical countries, it was nothing more than the dry bed of a , or a chain of small pools with long sand bars between.
 
Overhead the thick jungle arched and hung like a tunnel of green. This was a good thing by day-time, as it kept the sun off better than a parasol. And in the dry stretches of river bed, where the Doctor had to carry or drag the canoe on home-made runners, the work was hard and shade something to be grateful for.
 
At the end of the first day John Dolittle wanted to leave the canoe in a safe place and finish the trip on foot. But the snake said they would need it further on, where there was more water and many swamps to cross.
 
As they went forward the jungle around them seemed to grow thicker and thicker all the time. But there was always this clear alley-way along the river bed. And though the stream's course did much and twisting, the going was good.
 
The Doctor saw a great deal of new country, trees he had never met before, gay-colored , butterflies, ferns, birds and rare monkeys. So his notebook was kept busy all the time with and and adding to his already great knowledge of natural history.
 
On the third day of travel this river bed led them into an new and different kind of country. If you have never been in a swamp, it is difficult to imagine what it looks like. It was mournful scenery. Flat land, full of pools and streamlets, dotted with tufts of grass and weed, with gnarled roots and brambling bushes, spread out for miles and miles in every direction. It reminded the Doctor of some huge shrubbery that had been flooded by heavy rains. No large trees were here, such as they had seen in the jungle lower down. Seven or eight feet above their heads was as high as the mangroves grew and from their thin long streamers of hung like gray, fluttering rags.
 
The life, too, about them was quite different. The gayly colored birds of the true forest did not care for this damp country of half water and half land. Instead, all manner of swamp birds—big-billed and long-necked, for the most part—peered at them from the saplings. Many kinds of herons, egrets, ibises, grebes, bitterns—even stately anhingas, who can fly beneath the water—were in the swamps or nesting on the little tufty islands. In and out of the holes about the gnarled roots strange and water creatures—things half fish and half lizard—scuttled and quarreled with brightly colored .
 
For many folks it would have seemed a creepy, nightmary sort of country, this land of the mangrove swamps. But to the Doctor, for whom any kind of animal life was always companionable and good intentioned, it was a most new field of exploration.
 
They were glad now that the snake had not allowed them to leave the canoe behind. For here, where every step you took you were liable to sink down in the mud up to your waist, Jip and the Doctor would have had hard work to get along at all without it. And, even with it, the going was slow and hard enough. The mangroves spread out long, twisting, crossing arms in every direction to bar your passage—as though they were to guard the secrets of this silent, gloomy land where men could not make a home and seldom ever came.
 
Indeed, if it had not been for the giant water snake, to whom mangrove swamps were the easi............