[1] After musing about the okapi, Bronson reports that Jordan said the following: Then there's the infernal horror of the reptilian 'bounder' that comes up the Maggori River, out of the lake the Lumbwa have christened Dingonek.
Jordan says he encountered the creature while heading to the Maggori, when: Presently I heard the bush smashing and up raced my Lumbwa, wide-eyed and gray as their black skins could get, with the yarn that they had seen a frightful strange beast on the river bank, which at sight of them had plunged into the water as they described it, some sort of cross between a sea serpent, a leopard, and a whale.
He describes it as follows: Holy saints, but he was a sight fourteen or fifteen feet [4.3 or 4.6 m] long, head big as that of a lioness but shaped and marked like a leopard, two long white fangs sticking down straight out of his upper jaw, back broad as a hippo, scaled like an armadillo, but colored and marked like a leopard, and a broad fin tail, with slow, lazy swishes of which he was easily holding himself level in the swift current, headed up stream.Gad!
Bronson follows this account by noting that when he visited Uganda "in November last", he met with "ex-Collector James Martin" who told him that "a great water serpent or reptile was seen on or near the north shore of the lake, which was worshipped by the natives, who believed its coming a harbinger of heavy crops and large increase of their flocks and herds.
"[6] Finally, Bronson says that: Again, in December, while dining with the Senior Deputy Commissioner, C. W. Hobley, C. M. G., at his residence in Nairobi, the very night before starting on this safari, in speaking of the origin of the sleeping sickness Mr. Hobley told me that the Baganda, Wasoga, and Kavirondo of the north shore of the lake had from time immemorial sacrificed burnt offerings of cattle and sheep to a lake reptile of great size and terrible appearance they called Luquata, which occasionally appeared along or near the shore; that since the last coming of Luquata was just shortly before the first outbreak of the sleeping sickness, the natives firmly believe that the muzungu have killed Luquata with the purpose and as the means of making them victims of the dread plague.
[6]In 1913, Charles William Hobley published an article in the Journal of East Africa Uganda Natural History Society, in which he discusses "Some Unidentified Beasts" and mentions Bronson's account.
According to Hobley: At the time this story appeared it was considered that this was probably a traveller's tale, told to entertain a newcomer, but I have since met a man who a few years back wandering about the Mara River or Ngare Dubash which rises in Sotik, crosses the Anglo-German boundary and runs into Lake Victoria in German territory.
Whether it is a descendant of one of the huge prehistoric saurions that has by a process of adaptation – living as it does in impenetrable regions far away from the encroachments of civilized man – continued with but slight modifications through prodigious ages to the present time, or whether it is an unclassified reptile or amphibian, it is equally impossible to say, as no specimen exists either of its bones or of its skin.