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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of African Camp Fires, by Stewart Edward White
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: African Camp Fires
+
+Author: Stewart Edward White
+
+Release Date: December 24, 2004 [EBook #14451]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AFRICAN CAMP FIRES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Steven Gibbs and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+AFRICAN CAMP FIRES
+
+BY
+
+STEWART EDWARD WHITE
+
+     THOMAS NELSON AND SONS
+     LONDON, EDINBURGH, DUBLIN
+     AND NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+     PART I.--TO THE ISLAND OF WAR.
+
+     I. THE OPEN DOOR
+
+     II. THE FAREWELL
+
+     III. PORT SAID
+
+     IV. SUEZ
+
+     V. THE RED SEA
+
+     VI. ADEN
+
+     VII. THE INDIAN OCEAN
+
+     VIII. MOMBASA
+
+
+     PART II.--THE SHIMBA HILLS.
+
+     IX. A TROPICAL JUNGLE
+
+     X. THE SABLE
+
+     XI. A MARCH ALONG THE COAST
+
+     XII. THE FIRE
+
+
+     PART III.--NAIROBI.
+
+     XIII. UP FROM THE COAST
+
+     XIV. A TOWN OF CONTRASTS
+
+     XV. PEOPLE
+
+     XVI. RECRUITING
+
+
+     PART IV.--A LION HUNT ON KAPITI.
+
+     XVII. AN OSTRICH FARM AT MACHAKOS
+
+     XVIII. THE FIRST LIONESS
+
+     XIX. THE DOGS
+
+     XX. BONDONI
+
+     XXI. RIDING THE PLAINS
+
+     XXII. THE SECOND LIONESS
+
+     XXIII. THE BIG LION
+
+     XXIV. THE FIFTEEN LIONS
+
+
+     PART V.--THE TSAVO RIVER.
+
+     XXV. VOI
+
+     XXVI. THE FRINGE-EARED ORYX
+
+     XXVII. ACROSS THE SERENGETTI
+
+     XXVIII. DOWN THE RIVER
+
+     XXIX. THE LESSER KUDU
+
+     XXX. ADVENTURES BY THE WAY
+
+     XXXI. THE LOST SAFARI
+
+     XXXII. THE BABU
+
+
+     PART VI.--IN MASAILAND.
+
+     XXXIII. OVER THE LIKIPIA ESCARPMENT
+
+     XXXIV. TO THE KEDONG
+
+     XXXV. THE TEANSPORT RIDER
+
+     XXXVI. ACROSS THE THIRST
+
+     XXXVII. THE SOUTHERN GUASO NYERO
+
+     XXXVIII. THE LOWER BENCHES
+
+     XXXIX. NOTES ON THE MASAI
+
+     XL. THROUGH THE ENCHANTED FOREST
+
+     XLI. NAIOKOTUKU
+
+     XLII. SCOUTING IN THE ELEPHANT FOREST
+
+     XLIII. THE TOPI CAMP
+
+     XLIV. THE UNKNOWN LAND
+
+     XLV. THE ROAN
+
+     XLVI. THE GREATER KUDU
+
+     XLVII. THE MAGIC PORTALS CLOSE
+
+     XLVIII. THE LAST TREK
+
+
+
+
+PART I.
+
+
+TO THE ISLAND OF WAR.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+THE OPEN DOOR.
+
+
+There are many interesting hotels scattered about the world, with a few
+of which I am acquainted and with a great many of which I am not. Of
+course all hotels are interesting, from one point of view or another. In
+fact, the surest way to fix an audience's attention is to introduce your
+hero, or to display your opening chorus in the lobby or along the façade
+of a hotel. The life, the movement and colour, the drifting
+individualities, the pretence, the bluff, the self-consciousness, the
+independence, the _ennui_, the darting or lounging servants, the very
+fact that of those before your eyes seven out of ten are drawn from
+distant and scattered places, are sufficient in themselves to invest the
+smallest hostelry with glamour. It is not of this general interest that
+I would now speak. Nor is it my intention at present to glance at the
+hotels wherein "quaintness" is specialized, whether intentionally or no.
+There are thousands of them; and all of them well worth the
+discriminating traveller's attention. Concerning some of them--as the
+old inns at Dives-sur-Mer and at Mont St. Michel--whole books have been
+written. These depend for their charm on a mingled gift of the unusual
+and the picturesque. There are, as I have said, thousands of them; and
+of their cataloguing, should one embark on so wide a sea, there could be
+no end. And, again, I must for convenience exclude the altogether
+charming places, like the Tour d'Argent of Paris, Simpson's of the
+Strand,[1] and a dozen others that will spring to every traveller's
+memory, where the personality of the host, or of a chef, or even a
+waiter, is at once a magnet for the attraction of visitors and a reward
+for their coming. These, too, are many. In the interest to which I would
+draw attention, the hotel as a building or as an institution has little
+part. It is indeed a façade, a _mise en scène_before which play the
+actors that attract our attention and applause. The set may be as
+modernly elaborate as Peacock Alley of the Waldorf or the templed lobby
+of the St. Francis; or it may present the severe and Elizabethan
+simplicity of the stone-paved veranda of the Norfolk at Nairobi--the
+matter is quite inessential to the spectator. His appreciation is only
+slightly and indirectly influenced by these things. Sunk in his
+arm-chair--of velvet or of canvas--he puffs hard and silently at his
+cigar, watching and listening as the pageant and the conversation eddy
+by.
+
+Of such hotels I number that gaudy and polysyllabic hostelry the Grand
+Hôtel du Louvre et de la Paix at Marseilles. I am indifferent to the
+facts that it is situated on that fine thoroughfare, the Rue de
+Cannebière, which the proud and untravelled native devoutly believes to
+be the finest street in the world; that it possesses a dining-room of
+gilded and painted _repoussé_ work so elaborate and wonderful that it
+surely must be intended to represent a tinsmith's dream of heaven; that
+its concierge is the most impressive human being on earth except Ludwig
+von Kampf (whom I have never seen); that its head waiter is sadder and
+more elderly and forgiving than any other head waiter; and that its
+hushed and cathedral atmosphere has been undisturbed through immemorial
+years. That is to be expected; and elsewhere to be duplicated in
+greater or lesser degree. Nor in the lofty courtyard, or the equally
+lofty halls and reading-rooms, is there ever much bustle and movement.
+People sit quietly, or move with circumspection. Servants glide. The
+fall of a book or teaspoon, the sudden closing of a door, are events to
+be remarked. Once a day, however, a huge gong sounds, the glass doors of
+the inner courtyard are thrown open with a flourish, and enters the huge
+bus fairly among those peacefully sitting at the tables, horses' hoofs
+striking fire, long lash-cracking volleys, wheels roaring amid hollow
+reverberations. From the interior of this bus emerge people; and from
+the top, by means of a strangely-constructed hooked ladder, are decanted
+boxes, trunks, and appurtenances of various sorts. In these people, and
+in these boxes, trunks, and appurtenances, are the real interest of the
+Grand Hôtel du Louvre et de la Paix of the marvellous Rue Cannebière of
+Marseilles.
+
+For at Marseilles land ships, many ships, from all the scattered ends of
+the earth; and from Marseilles depart trains for the North, where is
+home, or the way home for many peoples. And since the arrival of ships
+is uncertain, and the departure of trains fixed, it follows that
+everybody descends for a little or greater period at the Grand Hôtel du
+Louvre et de la Paix.
+
+They come lean and quiet and a little yellow from hard climates, with
+the names of strange places on their lips, and they speak familiarly of
+far-off things. Their clothes are generally of ancient cut, and the
+wrinkles and camphor aroma of a long packing away are yet discernible.
+Often they are still wearing sun helmets or double terai hats, pending a
+descent on a Piccadilly hatter two days hence. They move slowly and
+languidly; the ordinary piercing and dominant English enunciation has
+fallen to modulation; their eyes, while observant and alert, look tired.
+It is as though the far countries have sucked something from the pith of
+them in exchange for great experiences that nevertheless seem of little
+value; as though these men, having met at last face to face the ultimate
+of what the earth has to offer in the way of danger, hardship,
+difficulty, and the things that try men's souls, having unexpectedly
+found them all to fall short of both the importance and the final
+significance with which human-kind has always invested them, were now
+just a little at a loss. Therefore they stretch their long, lean frames
+in the wicker chairs, they sip the long drinks at their elbows, puff
+slowly at their long, lean cheroots, and talk spasmodically in short
+sentences.
+
+Of quite a different type are those going out--young fellows full of
+northern health and energy, full of the eagerness of anticipation, full
+of romance skilfully concealed, self-certain, authoritative, clear
+voiced. Their exit from the bus is followed by a rain of hold-alls,
+bags, new tin boxes, new gun cases, all lettered freshly--an enormous
+kit doomed to diminution. They overflow the place, ebb towards their
+respective rooms; return scrubbed and ruddy, correctly clad, correctly
+unconscious of everybody else; sink into more wicker chairs. The quiet
+brown and yellow men continue to puff at their cheroots, quite eclipsed.
+After a time one of them picks up his battered old sun helmet and goes
+out into the street. The eyes of the newcomers follow him. They fall
+silent; and their eyes, under cover of pulled moustache, furtively
+glance towards the lean man's companions. Then on that office falls a
+great silence, broken only by the occasional rare remarks of the quiet
+men with the cheroots. The youngsters are listening with all their ears,
+though from their appearance no one would suspect that fact. Not a
+syllable escapes them. These quiet men have been there; they have seen
+with their own eyes; their lightest word is saturated with the mystery
+and romance of the unknown. Their easy, matter-of-fact, everyday
+knowledge is richly wonderful. It would seem natural for these
+young-young men to question these old-young men of that which they
+desire so ardently to know; but that isn't done, you know. So they sit
+tight, and pretend they are not listening, and feast their ears on the
+wonderful syllables--Ankobar, Kabul, Peshawur, Annam, Nyassaland,
+Kerman, Serengetti, Tanganika, and many others. On these beautiful
+syllables must their imaginations feed, for that which is told is as
+nothing at all. Adventure there is none, romance there is none, mention
+of high emprise there is none. Adventure, romance, high emprise have to
+these men somehow lost their importance. Perhaps such things have been
+to them too common--as well mention the morning egg. Perhaps they have
+found that there is no genuine adventure, no real romance except over
+the edge of the world where the rainbow stoops.
+
+The bus rattles in and rattles out again. It takes the fresh-faced young
+men down past the inner harbour to where lie the tall ships waiting.
+They and their cargo of exuberance, of hope, of energy, of thirst for
+the bubble adventure, the rainbow romance, sail away to where these
+wares have a market. And the quiet men glide away to the North. Their
+wares have been marketed. The sleepy, fierce, passionate, sunny lands
+have taken all they had to bring. And have given in exchange?
+Indifference, ill-health, a profound realization that the length of days
+are as nothing at all; a supreme agnosticism as to the ultimate value of
+anything that a single man can do, a sublime faith that it must be done,
+the power to concentrate, patience illimitable; contempt for danger,
+disregard of death, the intention to live; a final, weary estimate of
+the fact that mere things are as unimportant here as there, no matter
+how quaintly or fantastically they are dressed or named, and a
+corresponding emptiness of anticipation for the future--these items are
+only a random few of the price given by the ancient lands for that which
+the northern races bring to them. What other alchemical changes have
+been wrought only these lean and weary men could know--if they dared
+look so far within themselves. And even if they dared, they would not
+tell.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] In old days before the "improvements."
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+THE FAREWELL.
+
+
+We boarded ship, filled with a great, and what seemed to us, an
+unappeasable curiosity as to what we were going to see. It was not a
+very big ship, in spite of the grandiloquent descriptions in the
+advertisements, or the lithograph wherein she cut grandly and evenly
+through huge waves to the manifest discomfiture of infinitesimal sailing
+craft bobbing alongside. She was manned entirely by Germans. The room
+stewards waited at table, cleaned the public saloons, kept the library,
+rustled the baggage, and played in the band. That is why we took our
+music between meals. Our staterooms were very tiny indeed. Each was
+provided with an electric fan; a totally inadequate and rather
+aggravating electric fan once we had entered the Red Sea. Just at this
+moment we paid it little attention, for we were still in full enjoyment
+of sunny France, where, in our own experience, it had rained two months
+steadily. Indeed, at this moment it was raining, raining a steady, cold,
+sodden drizzle that had not even the grace to pick out the surface of
+the harbour in the jolly dancing staccato that goes far to lend
+attraction to a genuinely earnest rainstorm.
+
+Down the long quay splashed cabs and omnibuses, their drivers glistening
+in wet capes, to discharge under the open shed at the end various hasty
+individuals who marshalled long lines of porters with astonishing
+impedimenta and drove them up the gang-plank. A half-dozen roughs
+lounged aimlessly. A little bent old woman with a shawl over her head
+searched here and there. Occasionally she would find a twisted splinter
+of wood torn from the piles by a hawser or gouged from the planking by
+heavy freight, or kicked from the floor by the hoofs of horses. This she
+deposited carefully in a small covered market basket. She was entirely
+intent on this minute and rather pathetic task, quite unattending the
+greatness of the ship, or the many people the great hulk swallowed or
+spat forth.
+
+Near us against the rail leaned a dark-haired young Englishman whom
+later every man on that many-nationed ship came to recognize and to
+avoid as an insufferable bore. Now, however, the angel of good
+inspiration stooped to him. He tossed a copper two-sou piece down to the
+bent old woman. She heard the clink of the fall, and looked up
+bewildered. One of the waterside roughs slouched forward. The Englishman
+shouted a warning and a threat, indicating in pantomime for whom the
+coin was intended. To our surprise that evil-looking wharf rat smiled
+and waved his hand reassuringly, then took the old woman by the arm to
+show her where the coin had fallen. She hobbled to it with a haste
+eloquent of the horrible Marseillaise poverty-stricken alleys, picked it
+up joyously, turned--and with a delightful grace kissed her finger-tips
+towards the ship.
+
+Apparently we all of us had a few remaining French coins; and certainly
+we were all grateful to the young Englishman for his happy thought. The
+sous descended as fast as the woman could get to where they fell. So
+numerous were they that she had no time to express her gratitude except
+in broken snatches or gesture, in interrupted attitudes of the most
+complete thanksgiving. The day of miracles for her had come; and from
+the humble poverty that valued tiny and infrequent splinters of wood she
+had suddenly come into great wealth. Everybody was laughing, but in a
+very kindly sort of way it seemed to me; and the very wharf rats and
+gamins, wolfish and fierce in their everyday life of the water-front,
+seemed to take a genuine pleasure in pointing out to her the
+resting-place of those her dim old eyes had not seen. Silver pieces
+followed. These were too wonderful. She grew more and more excited,
+until several of the passengers leaning over the rail began to murmur
+warningly, fearing harm. After picking up each of these silver pieces,
+she bowed and gestured very gracefully, waving both hands outward,
+lifting eyes and hands to heaven, kissing her fingers, trying by every
+means in her power to express the dazzling wonder and joy that this
+unexpected marvel was bringing her. When she had done all these things
+many times, she hugged herself ecstatically. A very well-dressed and
+prosperous-looking Frenchman standing near seemed to be a little afraid
+she might hug him. His fear had, perhaps, some grounds, for she shook
+hands with everybody all around, and showed them her wealth in her
+kerchief, explaining eagerly, the tears running down her face.
+
+Now the gang-plank was drawn aboard, and the band struck up the usual
+lively air. At the first notes the old woman executed a few feeble
+little jig steps in sheer exuberance. Then the solemnity of the
+situation sobered her. Her great, wealthy, powerful, kind friends were
+departing on their long voyage over mysterious seas. Again and again,
+very earnestly, she repeated the graceful, slow pantomime--the wave of
+the arms outward, the eyes raised to heaven, the hands clasped finally
+over her head. As the brown strip of water silently widened between us
+it was strangely like a stage scene--the roofed sheds of the quay, the
+motionless groups, the central figure of the old woman depicting
+emotion.
+
+Suddenly she dropped her hands and hobbled away at a great rate,
+disappearing finally into the maze of the street beyond. Concluding that
+she had decided to get quickly home with her great treasure, we
+commended her discretion and gave our attention to other things.
+
+The drizzle fell uninterruptedly. We had edged sidewise the requisite
+distance, and were now gathering headway in our long voyage. The quail
+was beginning to recede and to diminish. Back from the street hastened
+the figure of the little old woman. She carried a large white cloth, of
+which she had evidently been in quest. This she unfolded and waved
+vigorously with both hands. Until we had passed quite from sight she
+stood there signalling her farewell. Long after we were beyond
+distinguishing her figure we could catch the flutter of white. Thus that
+ship's company, embarking each on his Great Adventure, far from home and
+friends, received their farewell, a very genuine farewell, from one poor
+old woman. B. ventured the opinion that it was the best thing we had
+bought with our French money.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+PORT SAID.
+
+
+The time of times to approach Port Said is just at the fall of dusk.
+Then the sea lies in opalescent patches, and the low shores fade away
+into the gathering night. The slanting masts and yards of the dhows
+silhouette against a sky of the deepest translucent green; and the
+heroic statue of De Lesseps, standing for ever at the Gateway he opened,
+points always to the mysterious East.
+
+The rhythmical, accustomed chug of the engines had fallen to quarter
+speed, leaving an uncanny stillness throughout the ship. Silently we
+slipped between the long piers, drew up on the waterside town, seized
+the buoy, and came to rest. All around us lay other ships of all sizes,
+motionless on the inky water. The reflections from their lights seemed
+to be thrust into the depths, like stilts; and the few lights from the
+town reflected shiveringly across. Along the water-front all was dark
+and silent. We caught the loom of buildings; and behind them a dull glow
+as from a fire, and guessed tall minarets, and heard the rising and
+falling of chanting. Numerous small boats hovered near, floating in and
+out of the patches of light we ourselves cast, waiting for permission to
+swarm at the gang-plank for our patronage.
+
+We went ashore, passed through a wicket gate, and across the dark
+buildings to the heart of the town, whence came the dull glow and the
+sounds of people.
+
+Here were two streets running across one another, both brilliantly
+lighted, both thronged, both lined with little shops. In the latter one
+could buy anything, in any language, with any money. In them we saw
+cheap straw hats made in Germany hung side by side with gorgeous and
+beautiful stuffs from the Orient; shoddy European garments and Eastern
+jewels; cheap celluloid combs and curious embroideries. The crowd of
+passers-by in the streets were compounded in the same curiously mixed
+fashion; a few Europeans, generally in white, and then a variety of
+Arabs, Egyptians, Somalis, Berbers, East Indians and the like, each in
+his own gaudy or graceful costume. It speaks well for the accuracy of
+feeling, anyway, of our various "Midways," "Pikes," and the like of our
+world's expositions that the streets of Port Said looked like Midways
+raised to the nth power. Along them we sauntered with a pleasing feeling
+of self-importance. On all sides we were gently and humbly besought--by
+the shopkeepers, by the sidewalk vendors, by would-be guides, by
+fortune-tellers, by jugglers, by magicians; all soft-voiced and
+respectful; all yielding as water to rebuff, but as quick as water to
+glide back again. The vendors were of the colours of the rainbow, and
+were heavily hung with long necklaces of coral or amber, with scarves,
+with strings of silver coins, with sequinned veils and silks, girt with
+many dirks and knives, furnished out in concealed pockets with scarabs,
+bracelets, sandalwood boxes or anything else under the broad canopy of
+heaven one might or might not desire. Their voices were soft and
+pleasing, their eyes had the beseeching quality of a good dog's, their
+anxious and deprecating faces were ready at the slightest encouragement
+to break out into the friendliest and most intimate of smiles. Wherever
+we went we were accompanied by a retinue straight out of the Arabian
+Nights, patiently awaiting the moment when we should tire; should seek
+out the table of a sidewalk café; and should, in our relaxed mood, be
+ready to unbend to our royal purchases.
+
+At that moment we were too much interested in the town itself. The tiny
+shops, with their smiling and insinuating Oriental keepers, were
+fascinating in their displays of carved woods, jewellery, perfumes,
+silks, tapestries, silversmiths' work, ostrich feathers, and the like.
+To either side the main street lay long narrow dark alleys, in which
+flared single lights, across which flitted mysterious long-robed
+figures, from which floated stray snatches of music either palpitatingly
+barbaric or ridiculously modern. There the authority of the straight,
+soldierly-looking Soudanese policemen ceased, and it was not safe to
+wander unarmed or alone.
+
+Besides these motley variegations of the East and West, the main feature
+of the town was the street car. It was an open-air structure of spacious
+dimensions, as though benches and a canopy had been erected rather
+haphazard on a small dancing platform. The track is absurdly narrow in
+gauge; and as a consequence the edifice swayed and swung from side to
+side. A single mule was attached to it loosely by about ten feet of
+rope. It was driven by a gaudy ragamuffin in a turban. Various other
+gaudy ragamuffins lounged largely and picturesquely on the widely spaced
+benches. Whence it came or whither it went I do not know. Its orbit
+swung into the main street, turned a corner, and disappeared. Apparently
+Europeans did not patronize this picturesque wreck, but drove elegantly
+but mysteriously in small open cabs conducted by totally incongruous
+turbaned drivers.
+
+We ended finally at an imposing corner hotel, where we dined by an open
+window just above the level of the street. A dozen upturned faces
+besought us silently during the meal. At a glance of even the mildest
+interest a dozen long brown arms thrust the spoils of the East upon our
+consideration. With us sat a large benign Swedish professor whose
+erudition was encyclopaedic, but whose kindly humanity was greater.
+Uttering deep, cavernous chuckles, the professor bargained. A red coral
+necklace for the moment was the matter of interest. The professor
+inspected it carefully, and handed it back.
+
+"I doubt if id iss coral," said he simply.
+
+The present owner of the beads went frantic with rapid-fire proof and
+vociferation. With the swiftness and precision of much repetition he
+fished out a match, struck it, applied the flame to the alleged coral,
+and blew out the match; cast the necklace on the pavement, produced
+mysteriously a small hammer, and with it proceeded frantically to pound
+the beads. Evidently he was accustomed to being doubted, and carried his
+materials for proof around with him. Then, in one motion, the hammer
+disappeared, the beads were snatched up, and again offered, unharmed,
+for inspection.
+
+"Are those good tests for genuineness?" we asked the professor, aside.
+
+"As to that," he replied regretfully, "I do not know. I know of coral
+only that is the hard calcareous skeleton of the marine coelenterate
+polyps; and that this red coral iss called of a sclerobasic group; and
+other facts of the kind; but I do not know if it iss supposed to resist
+impact and heat. Possibly," he ended shrewdly, "it is the common
+imitation which does _not_ resist impact and heat. At any rate they are
+pretty. How much?" he demanded of the vendor, a bright-eyed Egyptian
+waiting patiently until our conference should cease.
+
+"Twenty shillings," he replied promptly.
+
+The professor shook with one of his cavernous chuckles.
+
+"Too much," he observed, and handed the necklace back through the
+window.
+
+The Egyptian would by no means receive it.
+
+"Keep! keep!" he implored, thrusting the mass of red upon the professor
+with both hands. "How much you give?"
+
+"One shilling," announced the professor firmly.
+
+The coral necklace lay on the edge of the table throughout most of our
+leisurely meal. The vendor argued, pleaded, gave it up, disappeared in
+the crowd, returned dramatically after an interval. The professor ate
+calmly, chuckled much, and from time to time repeated firmly the words,
+"One shilling." Finally, at the cheese, he reached out, swept the coral
+into his pocket, and laid down two shillings. The Egyptian deftly
+gathered the coin, smiled cheerfully, and produced a glittering veil, in
+which he tried in vain to enlist Billy's interest.
+
+For coffee and cigars we moved to the terrace outside. Here an orchestra
+played, the peoples of many nations sat at little tables, the peddlers,
+fakirs, jugglers, and fortune-tellers swarmed. A half-dozen postal cards
+seemed sufficient to set a small boy up in trade, and to imbue him with
+all the importance and insistence of a merchant with jewels. Other
+ten-year-old ragamuffins tried to call our attention to some sort of
+sleight-of-hand with poor downy little chickens. Grave, turbaned, and
+polite Indians squatted cross-legged at our feet, begging to give us a
+look into the future by means of the only genuine hall-marked Yogi-ism;
+a troupe of acrobats went energetically and hopefully through quite a
+meritorious performance a few feet away; a deftly triumphant juggler did
+very easily, and directly beneath our watchful eyes, some really
+wonderful tricks. A butterfly-gorgeous swarm of insinuating smiling
+peddlers of small things dangled and spread their wares where they
+thought themselves most sure of attention. Beyond our own little group
+we saw slowly passing in the lighted street outside the portico the
+variegated and picturesque loungers. Across the way a phonograph bawled;
+our stringed orchestra played "The Dollar Princess;" from somewhere over
+in the dark and mysterious alleyways came the regular beating of a
+tom-tom. The magnificent and picturesque town car with its gaudy
+ragamuffins swayed by in train of its diminutive mule.
+
+Suddenly our persistent and amusing _entourage_ vanished in all
+directions. Standing idly at the portico was a very straight, black
+Soudanese. On his head was the usual red fez; his clothing was of trim
+khaki; his knees and feet were bare, with blue puttees between; and
+around his middle was drawn close and smooth a blood-red sash at least a
+foot and a half in breadth. He made a fine upstanding Egyptian figure,
+and was armed with pride, a short sheathed club, and a great scorn. No
+word spoke he, nor command; but merely jerked a thumb towards the
+darkness, and into the darkness our many-hued horde melted away. We were
+left feeling rather lonesome!
+
+Near midnight we sauntered down the street to the quay, whence we were
+rowed to the ship by another turbaned, long-robed figure, who sweetly
+begged just a copper or so "for poor boatman."
+
+We found the ship in the process of coaling, every porthole and doorway
+closed, and heavy canvas hung to protect as far as possible the clean
+decks. Two barges were moored alongside. Two blazing braziers lighted
+them with weird red and flickering flames. In their depths, cast in
+black and red shadows, toiled half-guessed figures; from their depths,
+mounting a single steep plank, came an unbroken procession of natives,
+naked save for a wisp of cloth around the loins. They trod closely on
+each other's heels, carrying each his basket atop his head or on one
+shoulder, mounted a gang-plank, discharged their loads into the side of
+the ship, and descended again to the depths by way of another plank. The
+lights flickered across their dark faces, their gleaming teeth and eyes.
+Somehow the work demanded a heap of screeching, shouting, and
+gesticulation; but somehow also it went forward rapidly. Dozens of
+unattached natives lounged about the gunwales with apparently nothing to
+do but to look picturesque. Shore boats moved into the narrow circle of
+light, drifted to our gangway, and discharged huge crates of vegetables,
+sacks of unknown stuffs, and returning passengers. A vigilant police
+boat hovered near to settle disputes, generally with the blade of an
+oar. For a long time we leaned over the rail watching them, and the
+various reflected lights in the water, and the very clear, unwavering
+stars. Then, the coaling finished, and the portholes once more opened,
+we turned in.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+SUEZ.
+
+
+Some time during the night we must have started, but so gently had we
+slid along it fractional speed that until I raised my head and looked
+out I had not realized the fact. I saw a high sandbank. This glided
+monotonously by until I grew tired of looking at it and got up.
+
+After breakfast, however, I found that the sandbank had various
+attractions all of its own. Three camels laden with stone and in convoy
+of white-clad figures shuffled down the slope at a picturesque angle.
+Two cowled women in black, veiled to the eyes in gauze heavily sewn with
+sequins, barefooted, with massive silver anklets, watched us pass. Hindu
+workmen in turban and loin-cloth furnished a picturesque note, but did
+not seem to be injuring themselves by over-exertion. Naked small boys
+raced us for a short distance. The banks glided by very slowly and very
+evenly, the wash sucked after us like water in a slough after a duck
+boat, and the sky above the yellow sand looked extremely blue.
+
+At short and regular intervals, half-way up the miniature sandhills,
+heavy piles or snubbing-posts had been planted. For these we at first
+could guess no reason. Soon, however, we had to pass another ship; and
+then we saw that one of us must tie up to avoid being drawn irresistibly
+by suction into collision with the other. The craft sidled by, separated
+by only a few feet, so that we could look across to each other's decks
+and exchange greetings. As the day grew this interest grew likewise.
+Dredgers in the canal; rusty tramps flying unfamiliar flags of strange
+tiny countries; big freighters, often with Greek or Turkish characters
+on their sterns; small dirty steamers of suspicious business; passenger
+ships like our own, returning from the tropics, with white-clad, languid
+figures reclining in canvas chairs; gunboats of this or that nation
+bound on mysterious affairs; once a P. & O. converted into a troopship,
+from whose every available porthole, hatch, deck, and shroud laughing,
+brown, English faces shouted chaff at our German decks--all these
+either tied up for us, or were tied up for by us. The only craft that
+received no consideration on our part were the various picturesque Arab
+dhows, with their single masts and the long yards slanting across them.
+Since these were very small, our suction dragged at them cruelly. As a
+usual thing four vociferous figures clung desperately to a rope passed
+around one of the snubbing-posts ashore, while an old man shrieked
+syllables at them from the dhow itself. As they never by any chance
+thought of mooring her both stem and stern, the dhow generally changed
+ends rapidly, shipping considerable water in the process. It must be
+very trying to get so excited in a hot climate.
+
+The high sandbanks of the early part of the day soon dropped lower to
+afford us a wider view. In its broad, general features the country was,
+quite simply, the desert of Arizona over again. There were the same
+high, distant, and brittle-looking mountains, fragile and pearly; the
+same low, broken half-distances; the same wide sweeps; the same
+wonderful changing effects of light, colour, shadow, and mirage; the
+same occasional strips of green marking the watercourses and oases. As
+to smaller detail, we saw many interesting divergences. In the
+foreground constantly recurred the Bedouin brush shelters, each with its
+picturesque figure or so in flowing robes, and its grumpy camels. Twice
+we saw travelling caravans, exactly like the Bible pictures. At one
+place a single burnoused Arab, leaning on his elbows, reclined full
+length on the sky-line of a clean-cut sandhill. Glittering in the
+mirage, half-guessed, half-seen, we made out distant little white towns
+with slender palm trees. At places the water from the canal had
+overflowed wide tracts of country. Here, along the shore, we saw
+thousands of the water-fowl already familiar to us, as well as such
+strangers as gaudy kingfishers, ibises, and rosy flamingoes.
+
+The canal itself seemed to be in a continual state of repair. Dredgers
+were everywhere; some of the ordinary shovel type, others working by
+suction, and discharging far inland by means of weird huge pipes that
+apparently meandered at will over the face of nature. The control
+stations were beautifully French and neat, painted yellow, each with its
+gorgeous bougainvilleas in flower, its square-rigged signal masts, its
+brightly painted extra buoys standing in a row, its wharf--and its
+impassive Arab fishermen thereon. We reclined in our canvas chairs, had
+lemon squashes brought to us, and watched the entertainment steadily and
+slowly unrolled before us.
+
+We reached the end of the canal about three o'clock of the afternoon,
+and dropped anchor off the low-lying shores. Our binoculars showed us
+white houses in apparently single rank along a far-reaching narrow sand
+spit, with sparse trees and a railroad line. That was the town of Suez,
+and seemed so little interesting that we were not particularly sorry
+that we could not go ashore. Far in the distance were mountains; and the
+water all about us was the light, clear green of the sky at sunset.
+
+Innumerable dhows and row-boats swarmed down, filled with eager salesmen
+of curios and ostrich plumes. They had not much time in which to
+bargain, so they made it up in rapid-fire vociferation. One very tall
+and dignified Arab had as sailor of his craft the most extraordinary
+creature, just above the lower limit of the human race. He was of a dull
+coal black, without a single high light on him anywhere, as though he
+had been sand-papered, had prominent teeth, like those of a baboon, in a
+wrinkled, wizened monkey face, across which were three tattooed bands,
+and possessed a little, long-armed, spare figure, bent and wiry. He
+clambered up and down his mast, fetching things at his master's behest;
+leapt nonchalantly for our rail or his own spar, as the case might be,
+across the staggering abyss; clung so well with his toes that he might
+almost have been classified with the quadrumana; and between times
+squatted humped over on the rail, watching us with bright, elfish, alien
+eyes.
+
+At last the big German sailors bundled the whole variegated horde
+overside. It was time to go, and our anchor chain was already rumbling
+in the hawse pipes. They tumbled hastily into their boats; and at once
+swarmed up their masts, whence they feverishly continued their
+interrupted bargaining. In fact, so fully embarked on the tides of
+commerce were they, that they failed to notice the tides of nature
+widening between us. One old man, in especial, at the very top of his
+mast, jerked hither and thither by the sea, continued imploringly to
+offer an utterly ridiculous carved wooden camel long after it was
+impossible to have completed the transaction should anybody have been
+moonstruck enough to have desired it. Our ship's prow swung; and just at
+sunset, as the lights of Suez were twinkling out one by one, we headed
+down the Red Sea.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+THE RED SEA.
+
+
+Suez is indeed the gateway to the East. In the Mediterranean often the
+sea is rough, the winds cold, passengers are not yet acquainted, and hug
+the saloons or the leeward side of the deck. Once through the canal and
+all is changed by magic. The air is hot and languid; the ship's company
+down to the very scullions appear in immaculate white; the saloon chairs
+and transoms even are put in white coverings; electric fans hum
+everywhere; the run on lemon squashes begins; and many quaint and
+curious customs of the tropics obtain.
+
+For example: it is etiquette that before eight o'clock one may wander
+the decks at will in one's pyjamas, converse affably with fair ladies in
+pigtail and kimono, and be not abashed. But on the stroke of eight bells
+it is also etiquette to disappear very promptly and to array one's self
+for the day; and it is very improper indeed to see or be seen after that
+hour in the rather extreme _negligée_ of the early morning. Also it
+becomes the universal custom, or perhaps I should say the necessity, to
+slumber for an hour after the noon meal. Certainly sleep descending on
+the tropical traveller is armed with a bludgeon. Passengers, crew,
+steerage, "deck," animal, and bird fall down then in an enchantment. I
+have often wondered who navigates the ship during that sacred hour, or,
+indeed, if anybody navigates it at all. Perhaps that time is sacred to
+the genii of the old East, who close all prying mortal eyes, but in
+return lend a guiding hand to the most pressing of mortal affairs. The
+deck of the ship is a curious sight between the hours of half-past one
+and three. The tropical siesta requires no couching of the form. You sit
+down in your chair, with a book--you fade slowly into a deep, restful
+slumber. And yet it is a slumber wherein certain small pleasant things
+persist from the world outside. You remain dimly conscious of the
+rhythmic throbbing of the engines, of the beat of soft, warm air on your
+cheek.
+
+At three o'clock or thereabout you rise as gently back to life, and sit
+erect in your chair without a stretch or a yawn in your whole anatomy.
+Then is the one time of day for a display of energy--if you have any to
+display. Ship games, walks--fairly brisk--explorations to the
+forecastle, a watch for flying fish or Arab dhows, anything until
+tea-time. Then the glowing sunset; the opalescent sea, and the soft
+afterglow of the sky--and the bugle summoning you to dress. That is a
+mean job. Nothing could possibly swelter worse than the tiny cabin. The
+electric fan is an aggravation. You reappear in your fresh "whites"
+somewhat warm and flustered in both mind and body. A turn around the
+deck cools you off; and dinner restores your equanimity--dinner with the
+soft, warm tropic air breathing through all the wide-open ports; the
+electric fans drumming busily; the men all in clean white; the ladies,
+the very few precious ladies, in soft, low gowns. After dinner the deck,
+as near cool as it will be, and heads bare to the breeze of our
+progress, and glowing cigars. At ten or eleven o'clock the groups begin
+to break up, the canvas chairs to empty. Soon reappears a pyjamaed
+figure followed by a steward carrying a mattress. This is spread, under
+its owner's direction, in a dark corner forward. With a sigh you in your
+turn plunge down into the sweltering inferno of your cabin, only to
+reappear likewise with a steward and a mattress. The latter, if you are
+wise, you spread where the wind of the ship's going will be full upon
+you. It is a strong wind and blows upon you heavily, so that the sleeves
+and legs of your pyjamas flop, but it is a soft, warm wind, and beats
+you as with muffled fingers. In no temperate clime can you ever enjoy
+this peculiar effect of a strong breeze on your naked skin without even
+the faintest surface chilly sensation. So habituated has one become to
+feeling cooler in a draught that the absence of chill lends the night an
+unaccustomedness, the more weird in that it is unanalyzed, so that one
+feels definitely that one is in a strange, far country. This is
+intensified by the fact that in these latitudes the moon, the great,
+glorious, calm tropical moon, is directly overhead--follows the centre
+line of the zenith--instead of being, as with us in our temperate zone,
+always more or less declined to the horizon. This, too, lends the night
+an exotic quality, the more effective in that at first the reason for it
+is not apprehended.
+
+A night in the tropics is always more or less broken. One awakens, and
+sleeps again. Motionless white-clad figures, cigarettes glowing, are
+lounging against the rail looking out over a molten sea. The moonlight
+lies in patterns across the deck, shivering slightly under the throb of
+the engines, or occasionally swaying slowly forward or slowly back as
+the ship's course changes, but otherwise motionless, for here the sea is
+always calm. You raise your head, look about, sprawl in a new position
+on your mattress, fall asleep. On one of these occasions you find
+unexpectedly that the velvet-gray night has become steel-gray dawn, and
+that the kindly old quartermaster is bending over you. Sleepily, very
+sleepily, you stagger to your feet and collapse into the nearest chair.
+Then to the swish of water, as the sailors sluice the decks all around
+and under you, you fall into a really deep sleep.
+
+At six o'clock this is broken by chota-hazri, another tropical
+institution, consisting merely of clear tea and biscuits. I never could
+get to care for it, but nowhere in the tropics could I head it off. No
+matter how tired I was or how dead sleepy, I had to receive that
+confounded chota-hazri. Throwing things at the native who brought it did
+no good at all. He merely dodged. Admonition did no good, nor
+prohibition in strong terms. I was but one white man of the whole white
+race; and I had no right to possess idiosyncrasies running counter to
+dastur, the custom. However, as the early hours are profitable hours in
+the tropics, it did not drive me to homicide.
+
+The ship's company now developed. Our two prize members, fortunately for
+us, sat at our table. The first was the Swedish professor
+aforementioned. He was large, benign, paternal, broad in mind,
+thoroughly human and beloved, and yet profoundly erudite. He was our
+iconoclast in the way of food; for he performed small but illuminating
+dissections on his plate, and announced triumphantly results that were
+not a bit in accordance with the menu. A single bone was sufficient to
+take the pretension out of any fish. Our other particular friend was C.,
+with whom later we travelled in the interior of Africa. C. is a very
+celebrated hunter and explorer, an old Africander, his face seamed and
+tanned by many years in a hard climate. For several days we did not
+recognize him, although he sat fairly alongside, but put him down as a
+shy man, and let it go at that. He never stayed for the long _table
+d'hôte_ dinners, but fell upon the first solid course and made a
+complete meal from that. When he had quite finished eating all he
+could, he drank all he could; then he departed from the table, and took
+up a remote and inaccessible position in the corner of the smoking-room.
+He was engaged in growing the beard he customarily wore in the jungle--a
+most fierce outstanding Mohammedan-looking beard that terrified the
+intrusive into submission. And yet Bwana C. possesses the kindest blue
+eyes in the world, full of quiet patience, great understanding, and
+infinite gentleness. His manner was abrupt and uncompromising, but he
+would do anything in the world for one who stood in need of him. From
+women he fled; yet Billy won him with infinite patience, and in the
+event they became the closest of friends. Withal he possessed a pair of
+the most powerful shoulders I have ever seen on a man of his frame; and
+in the depths of his mild blue eyes flickered a flame of resolution that
+I could well imagine flaring up to something formidable. Slow to make
+friends, but staunch and loyal; gentle and forbearing, but fierce and
+implacable in action; at once loved and most terribly feared; shy as a
+wild animal, but straightforward and undeviating in his human relations;
+most remarkably quiet and unassuming, but with tremendous vital force in
+his deep eyes and forward-thrust jaw; informed with the widest and most
+understanding humanity, but unforgiving of evildoers; and with the most
+direct and absolute courage, Bwana C. was to me the most interesting man
+I met in Africa, and became the best of my friends.
+
+The only other man at our table happened to be, for our sins, the young
+Englishman mentioned as throwing the first coin to the old woman on the
+pier at Marseilles. We will call him Brown, and, because he represents a
+type, he is worth looking upon for a moment.
+
+He was of the super-enthusiastic sort; bubbling over with vitality, in
+and out of everything; bounding up at odd and languid moments. To an
+extraordinary extent he was afflicted with the spiritual blindness of
+his class. Quite genuinely, quite seriously, he was unconscious of the
+human significance of beings and institutions belonging to a foreign
+country or even to a class other than his own. His own kind he treated
+as complete and understandable human creatures. All others were merely
+objective. As we, to a certain extent, happened to fall in the former
+category, he was as pleasant to us as possible--that is, he was pleasant
+to us in his way, but had not insight enough to guess at how to be
+pleasant to us in our way. But as soon as he got out of his own class,
+or what he conceived to be such, he considered all people as
+"outsiders." He did not credit them with prejudices to rub, with
+feelings to hurt, indeed hardly with ears to overhear. Provided his
+subject was an "outsider," he had not the slightest hesitancy in saying
+exactly what he thought about any one, anywhere, always in his high
+clear English voice, no matter what the time or occasion. As a natural
+corollary he always rebuffed beggars and the like brutally, and was
+always quite sublimely doing little things that thoroughly shocked our
+sense of the other fellow's rights as a human being. In all this he did
+not mean to be cruel or inconsiderate. It was just the way he was built;
+and it never entered his head that "such people" had ears and brains.
+
+In the rest of the ship's company were a dozen or so other Englishmen of
+the upper classes, either army men on shooting trips, or youths going
+out with some idea of settling in the country. They were a clean-built,
+pleasant lot; good people to know anywhere, but of no unusual interest.
+It was only when one went abroad into the other nations that inscribable
+human interest could be found.
+
+There was the Greek, Scutari, and his bride, a languorous rather
+opulent beauty, with large dark eyes for all men, and a luxurious manner
+of lying back and fanning herself. She talked, soft-voiced, in half a
+dozen languages, changing from one to the other without a break in
+either her fluency or her thought. Her little lithe, active husband sat
+around and adored her. He was apparently a very able citizen indeed, for
+he was going out to take charge of the construction work on a German
+railway. To have filched so important a job from the Germans themselves
+shows that he must have had ability. With them were a middle-aged
+Holland couple, engaged conscientiously in travelling over the globe.
+They had been everywhere--the two American hemispheres, from one Arctic
+Sea to another, Siberia, China, the Malay Archipelago, this, that, and
+the other odd corner of the world. Always they sat placidly side by
+side, either in the saloon or on deck, smiling benignly, and conversing
+in spaced, comfortable syllables with everybody who happened along. Mrs.
+Breemen worked industriously on some kind of feminine gear, and
+explained to all and sundry that she travelled "to see de sceenery wid
+my hoos-band."
+
+Also in this group was a small wiry German doctor, who had lived for
+many years in the far interior of Africa, and was now returning after
+his vacation. He was a little man, bright-eyed and keen, with a clear
+complexion and hard flesh, in striking and agreeable contrast to most of
+his compatriots. The latter were trying to drink all the beer on the
+ship; but as she had been stocked for an eighty-day voyage, of which
+this was but the second week, they were not making noticeable headway.
+However, they did not seem to be easily discouraged. The Herr Doktor was
+most polite and attentive, but as we did not talk German nor much
+Swahili, and he had neither English nor much French, we had our
+difficulties. I have heard Billy in talking to him scatter fragments of
+these four languages through a single sentence!
+
+For several days we drifted down a warm flat sea. Then one morning we
+came on deck to find ourselves close aboard a number of volcanic
+islands. They were composed entirely of red and dark purple lava blocks,
+rugged, quite without vegetation save for occasional patches of stringy
+green in a gully; and uninhabited except for a lighthouse on one, and a
+fishing shanty near the shores of another. The high mournful mountains,
+with their dark shadows, seemed to brood over hot desolation. The rusted
+and battered stern of a wrecked steamer stuck up at an acute angle from
+the surges. Shortly after we picked up the shores of Arabia.
+
+Note the advantages of a half ignorance. From early childhood we had
+thought of Arabia as the "burning desert"--flat, of course--and of the
+Red Sea as bordered by "shifting sands" alone. If we had known the
+truth--if we had not been half ignorant--we would have missed the
+profound surprise of discovering that in reality the Red Sea is bordered
+by high and rugged mountains, leaving just space enough between
+themselves and the shore for a sloping plain on which our glasses could
+make out occasional palms. Perhaps the "shifting sands of the burning
+desert" lie somewhere beyond; but somebody might have mentioned these
+great mountains! After examining them attentively we had to confess that
+if this sort of thing continued farther north the children of Israel
+must have had a very hard time of it. Mocha shone white, glittering, and
+low, with the red and white spire of a mosque rising brilliantly above
+it.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+ADEN.
+
+
+It was cooler; and for a change we had turned into our bunks, when B.
+pounded on our stateroom door.
+
+"In the name of the Eternal East," said he, "come on deck!"
+
+We slipped on kimonos, and joined the row of scantily draped and
+interested figures along the rail.
+
+The ship lay quite still on a perfect sea of moonlight, bordered by a
+low flat distant shore on one side, and nearer mountains on the other. A
+strong flare, centred from two ship reflectors overside, made a focus of
+illumination that subdued, but could not quench, the soft moonlight with
+which all outside was silvered. A dozen boats, striving against a
+current or clinging as best they could to the ship's side, glided into
+the light and became real and solid; or dropped back into the ghostly
+white unsubstantiality of the moon. They were long, narrow boats, with
+small flush decks fore and aft. We looked down on them from almost
+directly above, so that we saw the thwarts and the ribs and the things
+they contained.
+
+Astern in each stood men, bending gracefully against the thrust of long
+sweeps. About their waists were squares of cloth, wrapped twice and
+tucked in. Otherwise they were naked, and the long smooth muscles of
+their slender bodies rippled under the skin. The latter was of a
+beautiful fine texture, and chocolate brown. These men had keen,
+intelligent, clear-cut faces, of the Greek order, as though the statues
+of a garden had been stained brown and had come to life. They leaned on
+their sweeps, thrusting slowly but strongly against the little wind and
+current that would drift them back.
+
+In the body of the boats crouched, sat, or lay a picturesque mob. Some
+pulled spasmodically on the very long limber oars; others squatted doing
+nothing; some, huddled shapelessly underneath white cloths that
+completely covered them, slept soundly in the bottom. We took these for
+merchandise until one of them suddenly threw aside his covering and sat
+up. Others, again, poised in proud and graceful attitudes on the
+extreme prows of their bobbing craft. Especially decorative were two,
+clad only in immense white turbans and white cloths about the waist. An
+old Arab with a white beard stood midships in one boat, quite
+motionless, except for the slight swaying necessary to preserve his
+equilibrium, his voluminous white draperies fluttering in the wind, his
+dark face just distinguishable under his burnouse. Most of the men were
+Somalis, however. Their keen small faces, slender but graceful necks,
+slim, well-formed torsos bending to every movement of the boat, and the
+white or gaudy draped nether garments were as decorative as the figures
+on an Egyptian tomb. One or two of the more barbaric had made neat
+headdresses of white clay plastered in the form of a skull-cap.
+
+After an interval a small and fussy tugboat steamed around our stern and
+drew alongside the gangway. Three passengers disembarked from her and
+made their way aboard. The main deck of the craft under an awning was
+heavily encumbered with trunks, tin boxes, hand baggage, tin bath-tubs,
+gun cases, and all sorts of impedimenta. The tugboat moored itself to us
+fore and aft, and proceeded to think about discharging. Perhaps twenty
+men in accurate replica of those in the small boats had charge of the
+job. They had their own methods. After a long interval devoted strictly
+to nothing, some unfathomable impulse would incite one or two or three
+of the natives to tackle a trunk. At it they tugged and heaved and
+pushed in the manner of ants making off with a particularly large fly or
+other treasure trove, tossing it up the steep gangway to the level of
+our decks. The trunks once safely bestowed, all interest, all industry,
+died. We thought that finished it, and wondered why the tug did not pull
+out of the way. But always, after an interval, another bright idea would
+strike another native or natives. He--or they--would disappear beneath
+the canvas awning over the tug's deck, to emerge shortly, carrying
+almost anything, from a parasol to a heavy chest.
+
+On close inspection they proved to be a very small people. The
+impression of graceful height had come from the slenderness and justness
+of their proportions, the smallness of their bones, and the upright
+grace of their carriage. After standing alongside one, we acquired a
+fine respect for their ability to handle those trunks at all.
+
+Moored to the other side of the ship we found two huge lighters, from
+which bales of goods were being hoisted aboard. Two camels and a dozen
+diminutive mules stood in the waist of one of these craft. The camels
+were as sniffy and supercilious and scornful as camels always are; and
+everybody promptly hated them with the hatred of the abysmally inferior
+spirit for something that scorns it, as is the usual attitude of the
+human mind towards camels. We waited for upwards of an hour, in the hope
+of seeing those camels hoisted aboard; but in vain. While we were so
+waiting one of the deck passengers below us, a Somali in white clothes
+and a gorgeous cerise turban, decided to turn in. He spread a square of
+thin matting atop one of the hatches, and began to unwind yards and
+yards of the fine silk turban. He came to the end of it--whisk! he sank
+to the deck; the turban, spread open by the resistance of the air,
+fluttered down to cover him from head to foot. Apparently he fell asleep
+at once, for he did not again move nor alter his position. He, as well
+as an astonishingly large proportion of the other Somalis and
+Abyssinians we saw, carried a queer, well-defined, triangular wound in
+his head. It had long since healed, was an inch or so across, and looked
+as though a piece of the skull had been removed. If a conscientious
+enemy had leisure and an icepick he would do just about that sort of a
+job. How its recipient had escaped instant death is a mystery.
+
+At length, about three o'clock, despairing of the camels, we turned in.
+
+After three hours' sleep we were again on deck. Aden by daylight seemed
+to be several sections of a town tucked into pockets in bold, raw, lava
+mountains that came down fairly to the water's edge. Between these
+pockets ran a narrow shore road; and along the road paced haughty camels
+hitched to diminutive carts. On contracted round bluffs towards the sea
+were various low bungalow buildings which, we were informed, comprised
+the military and civil officers' quarters. The real Aden has been built
+inland a short distance at the bottom of a cup in the mountains.
+Elaborate stone reservoirs have been constructed to catch rain water, as
+there is no other natural water supply whatever. The only difficulty is
+that it practically never rains; so the reservoirs stand empty, the
+water is distilled from the sea, and the haughty camels and the little
+carts do the distributing.
+
+The lava mountains occupy one side of the spacious bay or gulf. The
+foot of the bay and the other side are flat, with one or two very
+distant white villages, and many heaps of glittering salt as big as
+houses.
+
+We waited patiently at the rail for an hour more to see the camels slung
+aboard by the crane. It was worth the wait. They lost their impassive
+and immemorial dignity completely, sprawling, groaning, positively
+shrieking in dismay. When the solid deck rose to them, and the sling had
+been loosened, however, they regained their poise instantaneously. Their
+noses went up in the air, and they looked about them with a challenging,
+unsmiling superiority, as though to dare any one of us to laugh. Their
+native attendants immediately squatted down in front of them, and began
+to feed them with convenient lengths of what looked like our common
+marsh cat-tails. The camels did not even then manifest the slightest
+interest in the proceedings. Indeed, they would not condescend to reach
+out three inches for the most luscious tit-bit held that far from their
+aristocratic noses. The attendants had actually to thrust the fodder
+between their jaws. I am glad to say they condescended to chew.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+THE INDIAN OCEAN.
+
+
+Leaving Aden, and rounding the great promontory of Cape Guardafui, we
+turned south along the coast of Africa. Off the cape were strange, oily
+cross rips and currents on the surface of the sea; the flying-fish rose
+in flocks before our bows; high mountains of peaks and flat table tops
+thrust their summits into clouds; and along the coast the breakers
+spouted like whales. For the first time, too, we began to experience
+what our preconceptions had imagined as tropical heat. Heretofore we had
+been hot enough, in all conscience, but the air had felt as though
+wafted from an opened furnace door--dry and scorching. Now, although the
+temperature was lower,[2] the humidity was greater. A swooning languor
+was abroad over the spellbound ocean, a relaxing mist of enchantment.
+
+My glasses were constantly clouding over with a fine coating of water
+drops; exposed metal rusted overnight; the folds in garments accumulated
+mildew in an astonishingly brief period of time. There was never even
+the suggestion of chill in this dampness. It clung and enveloped like a
+grateful garment; and seemed only to lack sweet perfume.
+
+At this time, by good fortune, it happened that the moon came full. We
+had enjoyed its waxing during our voyage down the Red Sea; but now it
+had reached its greatest phase, and hung over the slumbering tropic
+ocean like a lantern. The lazy sea stirred beneath it, and the ship
+glided on, its lights fairly subdued by the splendour of the waters.
+Under the awnings the ship's company lounged in lazy attitudes or
+promenaded slowly, talking low voiced, cigars glowing in the splendid
+dusk. Overside, in the furrow of the disturbed waters, the
+phosphorescence flashed perpetually beneath the shadow of the ship.
+
+The days passed by languidly and all alike. On the chart outside the
+smoking-room door the procession of tiny German flags on pins marched
+steadily, an inch at a time, towards the south. Otherwise we might as
+well have imagined ourselves midgets afloat in a pond and getting
+nowhere.
+
+Somewhere north of the equator--before Father Neptune in ancient style
+had come aboard and ducked the lot of us--we were treated to the
+spectacle of how the German "sheep" reacts under a joke. Each nation has
+its type of fool; and all, for the joyousness of mankind, differ. On the
+bulletin board one evening appeared a notice to the effect that the
+following morning a limited number of sportsmen would be permitted
+ashore for the day. Each was advised to bring his own lunch, rifle, and
+drinks. The reason alleged was that the ship must round a certain cape
+across which the sportsmen could march afoot in sufficient time to
+permit them a little shooting.
+
+Now aboard ship were a dozen English, four Americans, and thirty or
+forty Germans. The Americans and English looked upon that bulletin,
+smiled gently, and went to order another round of lemon squashes. It was
+a meek, mild, little joke enough; but surely the bulletin board was as
+far as it could possibly go. Next morning, however, we observed a
+half-dozen of our German friends in khaki and sun helmet, very busy with
+lunch boxes, bottles of beer, rifles, and the like. They said they were
+going ashore as per bulletin. We looked at each other and hied us to the
+upper deck. There we found one of the boats slung overside, with our old
+friend the quartermaster ostentatiously stowing kegs of water, boxes,
+and the like.
+
+"When," we inquired gently, "does the expedition start?"
+
+"At ten o'clock," said he.
+
+It was now within fifteen minutes of that hour.
+
+We were at the time fully ten miles off shore, and forging ahead full
+speed parallel with the coast.
+
+We pointed out this fact to the quartermaster, but found, to our sorrow,
+that the poor old man had suddenly gone deaf! We therefore refrained
+from asking several other questions that had occurred to us--such as,
+why the cape was not shown on the map.
+
+"Somebody," said one of the Americans, a cowboy going out second class
+on the look for new cattle country, "is a goat. It sure looks to me like
+it was these yere steamboat people. They can't expect to rope nothing on
+such a raw deal as this!"
+
+To which the English assented, though in different idiom.
+
+But now up the companion ladder struggled eight serious-minded
+individuals herded by the second mate. They were armed to the teeth, and
+thoroughly equipped with things I had seen in German catalogues, but in
+whose existence I had never believed. A half-dozen sailors eagerly
+helped them with their multitudinous effects. Not a thought gave they to
+the fact that we were ten miles off the coast, that we gave no
+indication of slackening speed, that it would take the rest of the day
+to row ashore, that there was no cape for us to round, that if there
+were--oh! all the other hundred improbabilities peculiar to the
+situation. Under direction of the mate they deposited their impedimenta
+beneath a tarpaulin, and took their places in solemn rows amidships
+across the thwarts of the boat slung overside. The importance of the
+occasion sat upon them heavily; they were going ashore--in Africa--to
+Slay Wild Beasts. They looked upon themselves as of bolder, sterner
+stuff than the rest of us.
+
+When the procession first appeared, our cowboy's face for a single
+instant had flamed with amazed incredulity. Then a mask of
+expressionless stolidity fell across his features, which in no line
+thereafter varied one iota.
+
+"What are they going to do with them?" murmured one of the Englishmen,
+at a loss.
+
+"I reckon," said the cowboy, "that they look on this as the easiest way
+to drown them all to onct."
+
+Then from behind one of the other boats suddenly appeared a huge German
+sailor with a hose. The devoted imbeciles in the shore boat were
+drenched as by a cloud-burst. Back and forth and up and down the heavy
+stream played, while every other human being about the ship shrieked
+with joy. Did the victims rise up in a body and capture that hose nozzle
+and turn the stream to sweep the decks? Did they duck for shelter? Did
+they at least know enough to scatter and run? They did none of these
+things; but sat there in meek little rows like mannikins until the boat
+was half full of water and everything awash. Then, when the sailor shut
+off the stream, they continued to sit there until the mate came to order
+them out. Why? I cannot tell you. Perhaps that is the German idea of how
+to take a joke. Perhaps they were afraid worse things might be
+consequent on resistance. Perhaps they still hoped to go ashore. One of
+the Englishmen asked just that question.
+
+"What," he demanded disgustedly, "what is the matter with the beggars?"
+
+Our cowboy may have had the correct solution. He stretched his long
+legs and jumped down from the rail.
+
+"Nothing stirring above the ears," said he.
+
+It is customary in books of travel to describe this part of the journey
+somewhat as follows: "Skirting the low and uninteresting shores of
+Africa we at length reached," etc. Low and uninteresting shores! Through
+the glasses we made out distant mountains far beyond nearer hills. The
+latter were green-covered with dense forests whence rose mysterious
+smokes. Along the shore we saw an occasional cocoanut plantation to the
+water's edge and native huts and villages of thatch. Canoes of strange
+models lay drawn up on shelving beaches; queer fish-pounds of brush
+reached out considerable distances from the coast. The white surf
+pounded on a yellow beach.
+
+All about these things was the jungle, hemming in the plantations and
+villages, bordering the lagoons, creeping down until it fairly overhung
+the yellow beaches; as though, conqueror through all the country beyond,
+it were half-inclined to dispute dominion with old Ocean himself. It
+looked from the distance like a thick, soft coverlet thrown down over
+the country; following--or, rather, suggesting--the inequalities.
+Through the glasses we were occasionally able to peep under the edge of
+this coverlet, and see where the fringe of the jungle drew back in a
+little pocket, or to catch the sheen of mysterious dark rivers slipping
+to the sea. Up these dark rivers, by way of the entrances of these tiny
+pockets, the imagination then could lead on into the dimness beneath the
+sunlit upper surfaces.
+
+Towards the close of one afternoon we changed our course slightly, and
+swung in on a long slant towards the coast. We did it casually; too
+casually for so very important an action, for now at last we were about
+to touch the mysterious continent. Then we saw clearer the fine, big
+groves of palm and the luxuriance of the tropical vegetation. Against
+the greenery, bold and white, shone the buildings of Mombasa; and after
+a little while we saw an inland glitter that represented her narrow,
+deep bay, the stern of a wreck against the low, green cliffs, and
+strange, fat-trunked squat trees without leaves. Straight past all this
+we glided at half speed, then turned sharp to the right to enter a long
+wide expanse like a river, with green banks, twenty feet or so in
+height, grown thickly with the tall cocoanut palms. These gave way at
+times into broad, low lagoons, at the end of which were small beaches
+and boats, and native huts among more cocoanut groves. Through our
+glasses we could see the black men watching us, quite motionless,
+squatted on their heels.
+
+It was like suddenly entering another world, this gliding from the open
+sea straight into the heart of a green land. The ceaseless wash of waves
+we had left outside with the ocean; our engines had fallen silent.
+Across the hushed waters came to us strange chantings and the beating of
+a tom-tom, an occasional shrill shout from the unknown jungle. The sun
+was just set, and the tops of the palms caught the last rays; all below
+was dense green shadow. Across the surface of the water glided dug-out
+canoes of shapes strange to us. We passed ancient ruins almost
+completely dismantled, their stones half smothered in green rank growth.
+The wide river-like bay stretched on before us as far as the waning
+light permitted us to see; finally losing itself in the heart of
+mystery.
+
+Steadily and confidently our ship steamed forward, until at last, when
+we seemed to be afloat in a land-locked lake, we dropped anchor and came
+to rest.
+
+Darkness fell utterly before the usual quarantine regulations had been
+carried through. Active and efficient agents had already taken charge
+of our affairs, so we had only to wait idly by the rail until summoned.
+Then we jostled our way down the long gangway, passed and repassed by
+natives carrying baggage or returning for more baggage, stepped briskly
+aboard a very bobby little craft, clambered over a huge pile of baggage,
+and stowed ourselves as best we could. A figure in a long white robe sat
+astern, tiller ropes in hand; two half-naked blacks far up towards the
+prow manipulated a pair of tremendous sweeps. With a vast heaving,
+jabbering, and shouting, our boat disengaged itself from the swarm of
+other craft. We floated around the stern of our ship, and were
+immediately suspended in blackness dotted with the stars and their
+reflections, and with various twinkling scattered lights. To one of
+these we steered, and presently touched at a stone quay with steps. At
+last we set foot on the land to which so long we had journeyed and
+towards which our expectations had grown so great. We experienced "the
+pleasure that touches the souls of men landing on strange shores."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] 82-88° degrees in daytime, and 75-83° degrees at night.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+MOMBASA.
+
+
+A single light shone at the end of the stone quay, and another inside a
+big indeterminate building at some distance. We stumbled towards this,
+and found it to be the biggest shed ever constructed out of corrugated
+iron. A bearded Sikh stood on guard at its open entrance. He let any one
+and every one enter, with never a flicker of his expressionless black
+eyes; but allowed no one to go out again without the closest scrutiny
+for dutiable articles that lacked the blue customs plaster. We entered.
+The place was vast and barnlike and dim, and very, very hot. A
+half-dozen East Indians stood behind the counters; another, a babu, sat
+at a little desk ready to give his clerical attention to what might be
+required. We saw no European; but next morning found that one passed his
+daylight hours in this inferno of heat. For the moment we let our main
+baggage go, and occupied ourselves only with getting through our smaller
+effects. This accomplished, we stepped out past the Sikh into the
+grateful night.
+
+We had as guide a slender and wiry individual clad in tarboush and long
+white robe. In a vague, general way we knew that the town of Mombasa was
+across the island and about four miles distant. In what direction or how
+we got there we had not the remotest idea.
+
+The guide set off at a brisk pace with which we tried in vain to keep
+step. He knew the ground, and we did not; and the night was black dark.
+Commands to stop were of no avail whatever; nor could we get hold of him
+to restrain him by force. When we put on speed he put on speed too. His
+white robe glimmered ahead of us just in sight; and in the darkness
+other white robes, passing and crossing, glimmered also. At first the
+ground was rough, so that we stumbled outrageously. Billy and B. soon
+fell behind, and I heard their voices calling plaintively for us to slow
+down a bit.
+
+"If I ever lose this nigger, I'll never find him again," I shouted back,
+"but I can find you. Do the best you can!"
+
+We struck a smoother road that led up a hill on a long slant.
+Apparently for miles we followed thus, the white-robed individual ahead
+still deaf to all commands and the blood-curdling threats I had now come
+to uttering. All our personal baggage had long since mysteriously
+disappeared, ravished away from us at the customs house by a ragged
+horde of blacks. It began to look as though we were stranded in Africa
+without baggage or effects. Billy and B. were all the time growing
+fainter in the distance, though evidently they too had struck the long,
+slanting road.
+
+Then we came to a dim, solitary lantern glowing feebly beside a bench at
+what appeared to be the top of the hill. Here our guide at last came to
+a halt and turned to me a grinning face.
+
+"Samama hapa," he observed.
+
+There! That was the word I had been frantically searching my memory for!
+Samama--stop!
+
+The others struggled in. We were very warm. Up to the bench led a tiny
+car track, the rails not over two feet apart, like the toy railroads
+children use. This did not look much like grownup transportation, but it
+and the bench and the dim lantern represented all the visible world.
+
+We sat philosophically on the bench and enjoyed the soft tropical
+night. The air was tepid, heavy with unknown perfume, black as a band of
+velvet across the eyes, musical with the subdued undertones of a
+thousand thousand night insects. At points overhead the soft blind
+darkness melted imperceptibly into stars.
+
+After a long interval we distinguished a distant faint rattling, that
+each moment increased in loudness. Shortly came into view along the
+narrow tracks a most extraordinary vehicle. It was a small square
+platform on wheels, across which ran a bench seat, and over which spread
+a canopy. It carried also a dim lantern. This rumbled up to us and
+stopped. From its stern hopped two black boys. Obeying a smiling
+invitation, we took our places on the bench. The two boys immediately
+set to pushing us along the narrow track.
+
+We were off at an astonishing speed through the darkness. The night was
+deliciously tepid; and, as I have said, absolutely dark. We made out the
+tops of palms and the dim loom of great spreading trees, and could smell
+sweet, soft odours. The bare-headed, lightly-clad boys pattered
+alongside whenever the grade was easy, one hand resting against the
+rail; or pushed mightily up little hills; or clung alongside like
+monkeys while we rattled and swooped and plunged down hill into the
+darkness. Subsequently we learned that a huge flat beam projecting
+amidships from beneath the seat operated a brake which we above were
+supposed to manipulate; but being quite ignorant as to the ethics and
+mechanics of this strange street-car system, we swung and swayed at
+times quite breathlessly.
+
+After about fifteen minutes we began to pick up lights ahead, then to
+pass dimly-seen garden walls with trees whose brilliant flowers the
+lantern revealed fitfully. At last we made out white stucco houses, and
+shortly drew up with a flourish before the hotel itself.
+
+This was a two-story stucco affair, with deep verandas sunken in at each
+story. It fronted a wide white street facing a public garden; and this,
+we subsequently discovered, was about the only clear and open space in
+all the narrow town. Antelope horns were everywhere hung on the walls;
+and teakwood easy-chairs, with rests on which comfortably to elevate
+your feet above your head, stood all about. We entered a bare,
+brick-floored dining-room, and partook of tropical fruits quite new to
+us--papayes, mangoes, custard apples, pawpaws, and the small red eating
+bananas too delicate for export. Overhead the punkahs swung back and
+forth in lazy hypnotic rhythm. We could see the two blacks at the ends
+of the punkah cords outside on the veranda, their bodies swaying lithely
+in alternation as they threw their weight against the light ropes. Other
+blacks, in the long white robes and exquisitely worked white skull caps
+of the Swahili, glided noiselessly on bare feet, serving.
+
+After dinner we sat out until midnight in the teakwood chairs of the
+upper gallery, staring through the arches into the black, mysterious
+night, for it was very hot, and we rather dreaded the necessary mosquito
+veils as likely to prove stuffy. The mosquitoes are few in Mombasa, but
+they are very deadly--very. At midnight the thermometer stood 87° F.
+
+Our premonitions as to stuffiness were well justified. After a restless
+night we came awake at daylight to the sound of a fine row of some sort
+going on outside in the streets. Immediately we arose, threw aside the
+lattices, and hung out over the sill.
+
+The chalk-white road stretched before us. Opposite was a public square,
+grown with brilliant flowers, and flowering trees. We could not doubt
+the cause of the trouble. An Indian on a bicycle, hurrying to his
+office, had knocked down a native child. Said child, quite naked, sat
+in the middle of the white dust and howled to rend the heavens--whenever
+he felt himself observed. If, however, the attention of the crowd
+happened for the moment to be engrossed with the babu, the injured one
+sat up straight and watched the row with interested, rolling, pickaninny
+eyes. A native policeman made the centre of a whirling, vociferating
+group. He was a fine-looking chap, straight and soldierly, dressed in
+red tarboosh, khaki coat bound close around the waist by yards and yards
+of broad red webbing, loose, short drawers of khaki, bare knees and
+feet, and blue puttees between. His manner was inflexible. The babu
+jabbered excitedly; telling, in all probability, how he was innocent of
+fault, was late for his work, etc. In vain. He had to go; also the kid,
+who now, seeing himself again an object of interest, recommenced his
+howling. Then the babu began frantically to indicate members of the
+crowd whom he desired to retain as witnesses. Evidently not pleased with
+the prospect of appearing in court, those indicated promptly ducked and
+ran. The policeman as promptly pursued and collared them one by one. He
+was a long-legged policeman, and he ran well. The moment he laid hands
+on a fugitive, the latter collapsed; whereupon the policeman dropped him
+and took after another. The joke of it was that the one so abandoned did
+not try again to make off, but stayed as though he had been tagged at
+some game. Finally the whole lot, still vociferating, moved off down the
+white road.
+
+For over an hour we hung from our window sill, thoroughly interested and
+amused by the varied life that deployed before our eyes. The morning
+seemed deliciously cool after the hot night, although the thermometer
+stood high. The sky was very blue, with big piled white clouds down near
+the horizon. Dazzling sun shone on the white road, the white buildings
+visible up and down the street, the white walls enclosing their gardens,
+and the greenery and colours of the trees within them. For from what we
+could see from our window we immediately voted tropical vegetation quite
+up to advertisement: whole trees of gaudy red or yellow or bright orange
+blossoms, flowering vines, flowering shrubs, peered over the walls or
+through the fences; and behind them rose great mangoes or the slenderer
+shafts of bananas and cocoanut palms.
+
+Up and down wandered groups of various sorts of natives. A month later
+we would have been able to identify their different tribes and to know
+more about them; but now we wondered at them, as strange and
+picturesque peoples. They impressed us in general as being a fine lot of
+men, for they were of good physique, carried themselves well, and looked
+about them with a certain dignity and independence, a fine free pride of
+carriage and of step. This fact alone differentiated them from our own
+negroes; but, further, their features were in general much finer, and
+their skins of a clear mahogany beautiful in its satiny texture.
+Most--and these were the blackest--wore long white robes and fine
+openwork skull caps. They were the local race, the Swahili, had we but
+known it; the original "Zanzibari" who furnished Livingstone, Stanley,
+Speke, and the other early explorers with their men. Others, however,
+were much less "civilized." We saw one "Cook's tour from the jungle"
+consisting of six savages, their hair twisted into innumerable points,
+their ear lobes stretched to hang fairly to their shoulders, wearing
+only a rather neglectful blanket, adorned with polished wire, carrying
+war clubs and bright spears. They followed, with eyes and mouths open, a
+very sophisticated-looking city cousin in the usual white garments,
+swinging a jaunty, light bamboo cane. The cane seems to be a
+distinguishing mark of the leisured class. It not only means that you
+are not working, but also that you have no earthly desire to work.
+
+About this time one of the hotel boys brought the inevitable
+chota-hazri--the tea and biscuits of early morning. For this once it was
+very welcome.
+
+Our hotel proved to be on the direct line of freighting. There are no
+horses or draught animals in Mombasa; the fly is too deadly. Therefore
+all hauling is done by hand. The tiny tracks of the unique street car
+system run everywhere any one would wish to go; branching off even into
+private grounds and to the very front doors of bungalows situated far
+out of town. Each resident owns his own street car, just as elsewhere a
+man has his own carriage. There are, of course, public cars also, each
+with its pair of boys to push it; and also a number of rather decrepit
+rickshaws. As a natural corollary to the passenger traffic, the
+freighting also is handled by the blacks on large flat trucks with short
+guiding poles. These men are quite naked save for a small loin cloth;
+are beautifully shaped; and glisten all over with perspiration shining
+in the sun. So fine is the texture of their skins, the softness of their
+colour--so rippling the play of muscles--that this shining perspiration
+is like a beautiful polish. They rush from behind, slowly and steadily,
+and patiently and unwaveringly, the most tremendous loads of the
+heaviest stuffs. When the hill becomes too steep for them, they turn
+their backs against the truck; and by placing one foot behind the other,
+a few inches at a time, they edge their burden up the slope.
+
+The steering is done by one man at the pole or tongue in front. This
+individual also sets the key to the song by which in Africa all heavy
+labour is carried forward. He cries his wavering shrill-voiced chant;
+the toilers utter antiphony in low gruff tones. At a distance one hears
+only the wild high syncopated chanting; but as the affair draws slowly
+nearer, he catches the undertone of the responses. These latter are cast
+in the regular swing and rhythm of effort; but the steersman throws in
+his bit at odd and irregular intervals. Thus:
+
+Headman (shrill): "Hay, ah mon!"
+
+Pushers (gruff in rhythm): "Tunk!--tunk!--tunk!--" or:
+
+Headman (and wavering minor chant): "Ah--nah--nee--e-e-e!"
+
+Pushers (undertone): "Umbwa--jo-e! Um-bwa--jo--e!"
+
+These wild and barbaric chantings--in the distance; near at hand; dying
+into distance again--slow, dogged, toilsome, came to be to us one of the
+typical features of the place.
+
+After breakfast we put on our sun helmets and went forth curiously to
+view the town. We found it roughly divided into four quarters--the old
+Portuguese, the Arabic, the European, and the native. The Portuguese
+comprises the outer fringe next the water-front of the inner bay. It is
+very narrow of street, with whitewashed walls, balconies, and wonderful
+carven and studded doors. The business of the town is done here. The
+Arabic quarter lies back of it--a maze of narrow alleys winding
+aimlessly here and there between high white buildings, with occasionally
+the minarets and towers of a mosque. This district harboured, besides
+the upper-class Swahilis and Arabs, a large number of East Indians.
+Still back of this are thousands of the low grass, or mud and wattle
+huts of the natives, their roofs thatched with straw or palm. These are
+apparently arranged on little system. The small European population
+lives atop the sea bluffs beyond the old fort in the most attractive
+bungalows. This, the most desirable location of all, has remained open
+to them because heretofore the fierce wars with which Mombasa, "the
+Island of Blood," has been swept have made the exposed seaward lands
+impossible.
+
+No idle occupation can be more fascinating than to wander about the
+mazes of this ancient town. The variety of race and occupation is
+something astounding. Probably the one human note that, everywhere
+persisting, draws the whole together is furnished by the water-carriers.
+Mombasa has no water system whatever. The entire supply is drawn from
+numberless picturesque wells scattered everywhere in the crowded centre,
+and distributed mainly in Standard Oil cans suspended at either end of a
+short pole. By dint of constant daily exercise, hauling water up from a
+depth and carrying it various distances, these men have developed the
+most beautifully powerful figures. They proceed at a half trot, the
+slender poles, with forty pounds at either end, seeming fairly to cut
+into their naked shoulders, muttering a word of warning to the loiterers
+at every other breath--semeelay! semeelay! No matter in what part of
+Mombasa you may happen to be, or at what hour of the day or night, you
+will meet these industrious little men trotting along under their
+burdens.
+
+Everywhere also are the women, carrying themselves proudly erect, with a
+free swing of the hips. They wear invariably a single sheet of cotton
+cloth printed in blue or black with the most astonishing borders and
+spotty designs. This is drawn tight just above the breasts, leaving the
+shoulders and arms bare. Their hair is divided into perhaps a dozen
+parts running lengthwise of the head from the forehead to the nape of
+the neck, after the manner of the stripes on a watermelon. Each part
+then ends in a tiny twisted pigtail not over an inch long. The lobes of
+their ears have been stretched until they hold thick round disks about
+three inches in diameter, ornamented by concentric circles of different
+colours, with a red bull's eye for a centre. The outer edges of the ears
+are then further decorated with gold clasps set closely together. Many
+bracelets, necklaces, and armlets complete the get-up. They are big
+women, with soft velvety skins and a proud and haughty carriage--the
+counterparts of the men in the white robes and caps.
+
+By the way, it may be a good place here to remark that these garments,
+and the patterned squares of cloth worn by the women, are invariably
+most spotlessly clean.
+
+These, we learned, were the Swahilis, the ruling class, the descendants
+of the slave traders. Beside them are all sorts and conditions. Your
+true savage pleased his own fancy as to dress and personal adornment.
+The bushmen generally shaved the edges of their wool to leave a nice
+close-fitting natural skull cap, wore a single blanket draped from one
+shoulder, and carried a war club. The ear lobe seemed always to be
+stretched; sometimes sufficiently to have carried a pint bottle. Indeed,
+white marmalade jars seemed to be very popular wear. One ingenious
+person had acquired a dozen of the sort of safety pins used to fasten
+curtains to their rings. These he had snapped into the lobes, six on a
+side.
+
+We explored for some time. One of the Swahilis attached himself to us so
+unobtrusively that before we knew it we had accepted him as guide. In
+that capacity he realized an ideal, for he never addressed a word to us,
+nor did he even stay in sight. We wandered along at our sweet will,
+dawdling as slowly as we pleased. The guide had apparently quite
+disappeared. Look where we would we could in no manner discover him. At
+the next corner we would pause, undecided as to what to do; there, in
+the middle distance, would stand our friend, smiling. When he was sure
+we had seen him, and were about to take the turn properly, he would
+disappear again. Convoyed in this pleasant fashion we wound and twisted
+up and down and round and about through the most appalling maze. We saw
+the native markets with their vociferating sellers seated cross-legged
+on tables behind piles of fruit or vegetables, while an equally
+vociferating crowd surged up and down the aisles. Gray parrots and
+little monkeys perched everywhere about. Billy gave one of the monkeys a
+banana. He peeled it exactly as a man would have done, smelt it
+critically, and threw it back at her in the most insulting fashion. We
+saw also the rows of Hindu shops open to the street, with their gaudily
+dressed children of blackened eyelids, their stolid dirty proprietors,
+and their women marvellous in bright silks and massive bangles. In the
+thatched native quarter were more of the fine Swahili women sitting
+cross-legged on the earth under low verandas, engaged in different
+handicrafts; and chickens; and many amusing naked children. We made
+friends with many of them, communicating by laughter and by signs, while
+our guide stood unobtrusively in the middle distance waiting for us to
+come on. Just at sunset he led us out to a great open space, with a tall
+palm in the centre of it and the gathering of a multitude of people. A
+mollah was clambering into a high scaffold built of poles, whence
+shortly he began to intone a long-drawn-out "Allah! Allah! il Allah!"
+The cocoanut palms cut the sunset, and the boabab trees--the fat, lazy
+boababs--looked more monstrous than ever. We called our guide and
+conferred on him the munificent sum of sixteen and a half cents; with
+which, apparently much pleased, he departed. Then slowly we wandered
+back to the hotel.
+
+
+
+
+PART II.
+
+THE SHIMBA HILLS.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+A TROPICAL JUNGLE.
+
+
+Many months later, and after adventures elsewhere described,[3] besides
+others not relevant for the moment, F., an Englishman, and I returned to
+Mombasa. We came from some hundred odd miles in the interior where we
+had been exploring the sources and the course of the Tsavo River. Now
+our purpose was to penetrate into the low, hot, wooded country along the
+coast known as the Shimba Hills in quest of a rare beast called the
+sable antelope.
+
+These hills could be approached in one of two ways--by crossing the
+harbour, and then marching two days afoot; or by voyaging up to the very
+end of one of the long arms of the sea that extend many miles inland.
+The latter involved dhows, dependence on uncertain winds, favourable
+tides, and a heap of good luck. It was less laborious but most
+uncertain. At this stage of the plan the hotel manager came forward with
+the offer of a gasoline launch, which we gladly accepted.
+
+We embarked about noon, storing our native carriers and effects aboard a
+dhow hired for the occasion. This we purposed towing. A very neatly
+uniformed Swahili bearing on his stomach a highly-polished brass label
+as big as a door plate--"Harbour Police"--threw duck fists over what he
+called overloading the boat. He knew very little about boats, but threw
+very competent duck fists. As we did know something about boats, we
+braved unknown consequences by disregarding him utterly. No consequences
+ensued--unless perhaps to his own health. When everything was aboard,
+that dhow was pretty well down, but still well afloat. Then we white men
+took our places in the launch.
+
+This was a long narrow affair with a four-cylinder thirty-horsepower
+engine. As she possessed no speed gears, she had either to plunge ahead
+full speed or come to a stop; there were no compromises. Her steering
+was managed by a tiller instead of a wheel, so that a mere touch
+sufficed to swerve her ten feet from her course. As the dhow was in no
+respects built on such nervous lines, she did occasionally some fancy
+and splashing curves.
+
+The pilot of the launch turned out to be a sandy-haired Yankee who had
+been catching wild animals for Barnum and Bailey's circus. While waiting
+for his ship, he, being a proverbial handy Yankee, had taken on this
+job. He became quite interested in telling us this, and at times forgot
+his duties at the tiller. Then that racing-launch would take a wild
+swoop; the clumsy old dhow astern would try vainly, with much spray and
+dangerous careening, to follow; the compromise course would all but
+upset her; the spray would fly; the safari boys would take their
+ducking; the boat boys would yell and dance and lean frantically against
+the two long sweeps with which they tried to steer. In this wild and
+untrammelled fashion we careered up the bay, too interested in our own
+performances to pay much attention to the scenery. The low shores, with
+their cocoanut groves gracefully rising above the mangrove tangle,
+slipped by, and the distant blue Shimba Hills came nearer.
+
+After a while we turned into a narrower channel with a good many curves
+and a quite unknown depth of water. Down this we whooped at the full
+speed of our thirty-horsepower engine. Occasional natives, waist deep
+and fishing, stared after us open-eyed. The Yankee ventured a guess as
+to how hard she would hit on a mudbank. She promptly proved his guess a
+rank underestimate by doing so. We fell in a heap on the bottom. The
+dhow bore down on us with majestic momentum. The boat boys leaned
+frantically on their sweeps, and managed just to avoid us. The dhow also
+rammed the mudbank. A dozen reluctant boys hopped overboard and pushed
+us off. We pursued our merry way again. On either hand now appeared fish
+weirs of plaited coco fibre; which, being planted in the shallows,
+helped us materially to guess at the channel. Naked men, up to their
+shoulders in the water, attended to some mysterious need of the nets, or
+emerged dripping and sparkling from the water with baskets of fish atop
+their heads. The channel grew even narrower, and the mudbanks more
+frequent. We dodged a dozen in our headlong course. Our local guide, a
+Swahili in tarboosh and a beautiful saffron robe, showed signs of strong
+excitement. We were to stop, he said, around the next bend; and at this
+rate we never could stop. The Yankee remarked, superfluously, that it
+would be handy if this dod-blistered engine had a clutch; adding, as an
+afterthought, that no matter how long he stayed in the tropics his nose
+peeled. We asked what we should do if we over-carried our prospective
+landing-place. He replied that the dod-blistered thing did have a
+reverse. While thus conversing we shot around a corner into a complete
+cul-de-sac! Everything was shut off hastily, and an instant later we and
+the dhow smashed up high and dry on a cozy mud beach! We drew a deep
+breath and looked around us.
+
+Mangrove thicket to the edge of the slimy ooze; trees behind--that was
+all we could see. We gave our attention to the business of getting our
+men, our effects, and ourselves ashore. The ooze proved to be just above
+knee deep. The porters had a fearful and floundering time, and received
+much obvious comment from us perched in the bow of the launch. Finally
+everything was debarked. F. and I took off our boots; but our gunbearers
+expressed such horror at the mere thought of our plunging into the mud,
+that we dutifully climbed them pick-a-back and were carried. The hard
+shell beach was a hundred feet away, occupying a little recess where the
+persistent tough mangroves drew back. From it led a narrow path through
+the thicket. We waved and shouted a farewell to the crews of the launch
+and the dhow.
+
+The path for a hundred feet was walled in by the mangroves through which
+scuttled and rattled the big land crabs. Then suddenly we found
+ourselves in a story-book tropical paradise. The tall coco palms rose
+tufted above everything; the fans of the younger palms waved below;
+bananas thrust the banners of their broad leaves wherever they could
+find space; creepers and vines flung the lush luxuriance of their
+greenery over all the earth and into the depths of all the half-guessed
+shadows. In no direction could one see unobstructed farther than twenty
+feet, except straight up; and there one could see just as far as the
+tops of the palms. It was like being in a room--a green, hot, steamy,
+lovely room. Very bright-coloured birds that ought really to have been
+at home in their cages fluttered about.
+
+We had much vigorous clearing to do to make room for our tents. By the
+time the job was finished we were all pretty hot. Several of the boys
+made vain attempts to climb for nuts, but without success. We had
+brought them with us from the interior, where cocoanuts do not grow; and
+they did not understand the method. They could swarm up the tall slim
+stems all right, but could not manage to get through the
+downward-pointing spikes of the dead leaves. F. tried and failed, to the
+great amusement of the men, but to the greater amusement of myself. I
+was a wise person, and lay on my back on a canvas cot, so it was not
+much bother to look up and enjoy life. Not to earn absolutely the stigma
+of laziness, I tried to shoot some nuts down. This did not work either,
+for the soft, spongy stems closed around the bullet holes. Then a little
+wizened monkey of a Swahili porter, having watched our futile
+performances with interest, nonchalantly swarmed up; in some mysterious
+manner he wriggled through the defences, and perched in the top, whence
+he dropped to us a dozen big green nuts. Our men may not have been much
+of a success at climbing for nuts; but they were passed masters at the
+art of opening them. Three or four clips from their awkward swordlike
+pangas, and we were each presented with a clean, beautiful, natural
+goblet brimming full of a refreshing drink.
+
+About this time a fine figure of a man drifted into camp. He was very
+smooth-skinned, very dignified, very venerable. He was pure Swahili,
+though of the savage branch of that race, and had none of the negro
+type of countenance. In fact, so like was he in face, hair, short square
+beard and genial dignity to a certain great-uncle of mine that it was
+very hard to remember that he had on only a small strip of cloth, that
+he was cherishing as a great treasure a piece of soap box he had
+salvaged from the shore, and that his skin was red chocolate. I felt
+inclined to talk to him as to an intellectual equal, especially as he
+had a fine resonant bass voice that in itself lent his remarks some
+importance. However, I gave him two ordinary wood screws, showed him how
+they screwed in and out, and left him happy.
+
+After supper the moon rose, casting shadows of new and unknown shapes
+through this strangely new and unknown forest. A thin white mist
+ascending everywhere from the soil tempered but could not obscure the
+white brilliance. The thermometer stood now only at 82°, but the
+dripping tropical sweat-bath in which our camp was pitched considerably
+raised the sensible heat. A bird with a most diabolical shrieking note
+cursed in the shadows. Another, a pigeon-like creature, began softly,
+and continued to repeat in diminishing energy until it seemed to have
+run down, like a piece of clockwork.
+
+Our way next morning led for some time through this lovely but damp
+jungle. Then we angled up the side of a hill to emerge into the
+comparatively open country atop what we Westerners would call a "hog's
+back"--a long narrow spurlike ridge mounting slowly to the general
+elevation of the main hills. Here were high green bushes, with little
+free open passages between them, and occasionally meadow-like openings
+running down the slopes on one side or the other. Before us, some miles
+distant, were the rounded blue hills.
+
+We climbed steadily. It was still very early morning, but already the
+day was hot. Pretty soon we saw over the jungle to the gleaming waters
+of the inlet, and then to the sea. Our "hog's back" led us past a ridge
+of the hills, and before we knew it we had been deposited in a shallow
+valley three or four miles wide between parallel ridges; the said valley
+being at a considerable elevation, and itself diversified with rolling
+hills, ravines, meadow land, and wide flats. On many of the ridges were
+scattered cocoanut palms, and occasional mango groves, while many smokes
+attested the presence of natives.
+
+These we found in shambas or groups of little farms, huddled all
+together, with wilderness and brush and trees, or the wide open green
+grass lawn between. The houses were very large and neat-looking. They
+were constructed quite ingeniously from coco branches. Each branch made
+one mat. The leaves were all brought over to the same side of the stem,
+and then plaited. The resulting mat was then six or seven feet long by
+from twelve to sixteen inches broad, and could be used for a variety of
+purposes. Indeed, we found Melville's chapter in "Typhee" as to the
+various uses of the cocoanut palm by no means exaggerated. The nuts,
+leaves, and fibre supplied every conceivable human want.
+
+The natives were a pleasant, friendly, good-looking lot. In fact, so
+like was their cast of countenance to that of the white-skinned people
+we were accustomed to see that we had great difficulty in realizing that
+they were mere savages, costume--or lack of it--to the contrary
+notwithstanding. Under a huge mango tree two were engaged in dividing a
+sheep. Sixty or seventy others stood solemnly around watching. It may
+have been a religious ceremony, for all I know; but the affair looked to
+be about two parts business to sixty of idle and cheerful curiosity. We
+stopped and talked to them a little, chaffed the pretty girls--they were
+really pretty--and marched on.
+
+About noon our elegant guide stopped, struck an attitude, and pointed
+with his silver-headed rattan cane.
+
+"This," said he, "is where we must camp."
+
+We marched through a little village. A family party sat beneath the
+veranda of a fine building--a very old wrinkled couple; two stalwart
+beautiful youths; a young mother suckling her baby; two young girls; and
+eight or ten miscellaneous and naked youngsters. As the rest of the
+village appeared to be empty, I imagined this to be the caretaker's
+family, and the youngsters to belong to others. We stopped and spoke,
+were answered cheerfully, suggested that we might like to buy chickens,
+and offered a price. Instantly with a whoop of joy the lot of them were
+afoot. The fowl waited for no further intimations of troublous times,
+but fled squawking. They had been there before. So had our hosts; for
+inside a minute they had returned, each with a chicken--and a broad
+grin.
+
+After due payment we proceeded on a few hundred yards, and pitched camp
+beneath two huge mango trees.
+
+Besides furnishing one of the most delicious of the tropical fruits,
+the mango is also one of the most beautiful of trees. It is tall,
+spreads very wide, and its branches sweep to within ten feet of the
+ground. Its perfect symmetry combined with the size and deep green of
+its leaves causes it to resemble, from a short distance, a beautiful
+green hill. Beneath its umbrella one finds dense shade, unmottled by a
+single ray of sunlight, so that one can lie under it in full confidence.
+For, parenthetically, even a single ray of this tropical sunlight is to
+the unprotected a very dangerous thing. But the leaves of the mango have
+this peculiarity, which distinguishes it from all other trees--namely,
+that they grow only at the very ends of the small twigs and branches. As
+these, of course, grow only at the ends of the big limbs, it follows
+that from beneath the mango looks like a lofty green dome, a veritable
+pantheon of the forest.
+
+We made our camp under one of these trees; gave ourselves all the space
+we could use; and had plenty left over--five tents and a cook camp, with
+no crowding. It was one of the pleasantest camps I ever saw. Our green
+dome overhead protected us absolutely from the sun; high sweet grass
+grew all about us; the breeze wandered lazily up from the distant
+Indian Ocean. Directly before our tent door the slope fell gently away
+through a sparse cocoanut grove whose straight stems panelled our view,
+then rose again to the clear-cut outline of a straight ridge opposite.
+The crest of this was sentinelled by tall scattered cocoanut trees, the
+"bursting star" pyrotechnic effect of their tops being particularly fine
+against the sky.
+
+After a five hours' tropical march uphill we were glad to sit under our
+green dome, to look at our view, to enjoy the little breeze, and to
+drink some of the cocoanuts our friends the villagers brought in.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[3] "The Land of Footprints."
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+THE SABLE.
+
+
+About three o'clock I began to feel rested and ambitious. Therefore I
+called up our elegant guide and Memba Sasa, and set out on my first hunt
+for sable. F. was rather more done up by the hard morning, and so did
+not go along. The guide wore still his red tarboosh, his dark short
+jacket, his saffron yellow nether garment--it was not exactly a
+skirt--and his silver-headed rattan cane. The only change he made was to
+tuck up the skirt, leaving his long legs bare. It hardly seemed
+altogether a suitable costume for hunting; but he seemed to know what he
+was about.
+
+We marched along ridges, and down into ravines, and across gulleys
+choked with brush. Horrible thickets alternated with and occasionally
+surrounded open green meadows hanging against the side hills. As we
+proceeded, the country became rougher, the ravines more precipitous. We
+struggled up steep hills, fairly bucking our way through low growth that
+proved all but impenetrable. The idea was to find a sable feeding in one
+of the little open glades; but whenever I allowed myself to think of the
+many adverse elements of the game, the chances seemed very slim. It took
+a half-hour to get from one glade to the next; there were thousands of
+glades. The sable is a rare shy animal that likes dense cover fully as
+well if not better than the open. Sheer rank bull luck alone seemed the
+only hope. And as I felt my strength going in that vicious struggle
+against heavy brush and steep hills, I began to have very strong doubts
+indeed as to that sable.
+
+For it was cruel, hard work. In this climate one hailed a car or a
+rickshaw to do an errand two streets away, and considered oneself quite
+a hero if one took a leisurely two-mile stroll along the cliff heads at
+sunset. Here I was, after a five-hour uphill march, bucking into brush
+and through country that would be considered difficult going even in
+Canada. At the end of twenty minutes my every garment was not wringing
+but dripping wet, so that when I carried my rifle over my arm water ran
+down the barrel and off the muzzle in a steady stream. After a bit of
+this my knees began to weaken; and it became a question of saving
+energy, of getting along somehow, and of leaving the actual hunting to
+Memba Sasa and the guide. If they had shown me a sable, I very much
+doubt if I could have hit it.
+
+However, we did not see one, and I staggered into camp at dusk pretty
+well exhausted. From the most grateful hot bath and clean clothes I
+derived much refreshment. Shortly I was sitting in my canvas chair,
+sipping a cocoanut, and describing the condition of affairs to F., who
+was naturally very curious as to how the trick was done.
+
+"Now," I concluded, "I know just about what I can and what I cannot do.
+Three days more of this sort of work will feed me up. If we do not run
+across a sable in that time, I'm afraid we don't get any."
+
+"Two days will do for me," said he.
+
+We called up the guide and questioned him closely. He seemed quite
+confident; and asserted that in this country sable were found, when they
+were found at all, which was not often. They must be discovered in the
+small grassy openings. We began to understand why so very few people get
+sable.
+
+We dismissed the guide, and sat quietly smoking in the warm soft
+evening. The air was absolutely still save for various night insects and
+birds, and the weird calling of natives across the valleys. Far out
+towards the sea a thunderstorm flashed; and after a long interval the
+rumblings came to us. So very distant was it that we paid it little
+attention, save as an interesting background to our own still evening.
+Almost between sentences of our slow conversation, however, it rushed up
+to the zenith, blotting out the stars. The tall palms began to sway and
+rustle in the forerunning breeze. Then with a swoop it was upon us, a
+tempest of fury. We turned in; and all night long the heavy deluges of
+rain fell, roaring like surf on an unfriendly coast.
+
+By morning this had fallen to a light, steady drizzle in which we
+started off quite happily. In this climate one likes to get wet. The
+ground was sodden and deep with muck. Within a mile of camp we saw many
+fresh buffalo tracks.
+
+This time we went downhill and still downhill through openings among
+batches of great forest trees. The new leaves were just coming out in
+pinks and russets, so that the effect at a little distance was almost
+precisely that of our autumn foliage in its duller phases. So familiar
+were made some of the low rounded knolls that for an instant we were
+respectively back in the hills of Surrey or Michigan, and told each
+other so.
+
+Thus we moved slowly out from the dense cover to the grass openings. Far
+over on another ridge F. called my attention to something jet-black and
+indeterminate. In another country I should have named it as a charred
+log on an old pine burning, for that was precisely what it looked like.
+We glanced at it casually through our glasses. It was a sable buck lying
+down right out in the open. He was black and sleek, and we could make
+out his sweeping scimitar horns.
+
+Memba Sasa and the Swahili dropped flat on their faces while F. and I
+crawled slowly and cautiously through the mud until we had gained the
+cover of a shallow ravine that ran in the beast's general direction.
+Noting carefully a certain small thicket as landmark, we stooped and
+moved as fast as we could down to that point of vantage. There we
+cautiously parted the grasses and looked. The sable had disappeared. The
+place where he had been lying was plainly to be identified, and there
+was no cover save a tiny bush between two and three feet high. We were
+quite certain he had neither seen nor winded us. Either he had risen
+and fled forward into the ravine up which we had made our stalk, or else
+he had entered the small thicket. F. agreed to stay on watch where he
+was, while I slipped back and examined the earth to leeward of the
+thicket.
+
+I had hardly crawled ten yards, however, before the gentle snapping of
+F.'s fingers recalled me to his side.
+
+"He's behind that bush," he whispered in my ear.
+
+I looked. The bush was hardly large enough to conceal a setter dog, and
+the sable is somewhat larger than our elk. Nevertheless F. insisted that
+the animal was standing behind it, and that he had caught the toss of
+its head. We lay still for some time, while the soft, warm rain drizzled
+down on us, our eyes riveted on the bush. And then we caught the
+momentary flash of curved horns as the sable tossed his head. It seemed
+incredible even then that the tiny bush should conceal so large a beast.
+As a matter of fact we later found that the bush grew on a slight
+elevation, behind which was a depression. In this the sable stood,
+patiently enduring the drizzle.
+
+We waited some time in hopes he would move forward a foot or so; but
+apparently he had selected his loafing place with care, and liked it.
+The danger of a shift of wind was always present. Finally I slipped back
+over the brink of the ravine, moved three yards to the left, and crawled
+up through the tall dripping grass to a new position behind a little
+bush. Cautiously raising my head, I found I could see plainly the
+sable's head and part of his shoulders. My position was cramped and out
+of balance for offhand shooting; but I did my best, and heard the loud
+plunk of the hit. The sable made off at a fast though rather awkward
+gallop, wheeled for an instant a hundred yards farther on, received
+another bullet in the shoulder, and disappeared over the brow of the
+hill. We raced over the top to get in another shot, and found him stone
+dead.
+
+He was a fine beast, jet-black in coat, with white markings on the face,
+red-brown ears, and horns sweeping up and back scimitar fashion. He
+stood four feet and six inches at the shoulder, and his horns were the
+second best ever shot in British East Africa. This beast has been
+described by Heller as a new subspecies, and named Rooseveltii. His
+description was based upon an immature buck and a doe shot by Kermit
+Roosevelt. The determination of subspecies on so slight evidence seems
+to me unscientific in the extreme. While the immature males do exhibit
+the general brown tone relied on by Mr. Heller, the mature buck differs
+in no essential from the tropical sable. I find the alledged subspecies
+is not accepted by European scientists.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+A MARCH ALONG THE COAST.
+
+
+With a most comfortable feeling that my task was done, that suddenly the
+threatening clouds of killing work had been cleared up, I was now
+privileged to loaf and invite my soul on this tropical green hilltop
+while poor F. put in the days trying to find another sable. Every
+morning he started out before daylight. I could see the light of his
+lantern outside the tent; and I stretched myself in the luxurious
+consciousness that I should hear no deprecating but insistent "hodie"
+from my boy until I pleased to invite it. In the afternoon or evening F.
+would return, quite exhausted and dripping, with only the report of new
+country traversed. No sable; no tracks of sable; no old signs, even, of
+sable. Gradually it was borne in on me how lucky I was to have come upon
+my magnificent specimen so promptly and in such favourable
+circumstances.
+
+A leisurely breakfast alone, with the sun climbing; then the writing of
+notes, a little reading, and perhaps a stroll to the village or along
+the top of the ridge. At the heat of noon a siesta with a cool cocoanut
+at my elbow. The view was beautiful on all sides; our great tree full of
+birds; the rising and dying winds in the palms like the gathering
+oncoming rush of the rains. From mountain to mountain sounded the wild,
+far-carrying ululations of the natives, conveying news or messages
+across the wide jungle. Towards sunset I wandered out in the groves,
+enjoying the many bright flowers, the tall, sweet grasses, and the
+cocoa-palms against the sky. Piles of cocoanuts lay on the ground,
+covered each with a leaf plaited in a peculiarly individual manner to
+indicate ownership. Small boys, like little black imps, clung naked
+half-way up the slim trunks of the palms, watching me bright-eyed above
+the undergrowth. In all directions, crossing and recrossing, ran a maze
+of beaten paths. Each led somewhere, but it would require the memory
+of--well, of a native, to keep all their destinations in mind.
+
+I used to follow some of them to their ending in little cocoa-leaf
+houses on the tops of knolls or beneath mangoes; and would talk with the
+people. They were very grave and very polite, and seemed to be living
+out their lives quite correctly according to their conceptions. Again,
+it was borne in on me that these people are not stumbling along the
+course of evolution in our footsteps, but have gone as far in their path
+as we have in ours; that they have reached at least as complete a
+correspondence with their environment as we with our own.[4]
+
+If F. had not returned by the time I reached camp, I would seat myself
+in my canvas chair, and thence dispense justice, advice, or medical
+treatment. If none of these things seemed demanded, I smoked my pipe. To
+me one afternoon came a big-framed, old, dignified man, with the heavy
+beard, the noble features, the high forehead, and the blank statue eyes
+of the blind Homer. He was led by a very small, very bright-eyed naked
+boy. At some twenty feet distance he squatted down cross-legged before
+me. For quite five minutes he sat there silent, while I sat in my camp
+chair, smoked and waited. At last he spoke in a rolling deep bass voice
+rich and vibrating--a delight to hear.
+
+"Jambo (greeting)!" said he.
+
+"Jambo!" I replied mildly.
+
+Again a five-minute silence. I had begun reading, and had all but
+forgotten his presence.
+
+"Jambo bwana (greeting, master)!" he rolled out.
+
+"Jambo!" I repeated.
+
+The same dignified, unhasting pause.
+
+"Jambo bwana m'kubwa (greeting, great master)!"
+
+"Jambo!" quoth I, and went on reading. The sun was dropping, but the old
+man seemed in no hurry.
+
+"Jambo bwana m'kubwa sana (greeting, most mighty master)!" he boomed at
+last.
+
+"Jambo!" said I.
+
+This would seem to strike the superlative, and I expected now that he
+would state his business, but the old man had one more shot in his
+locker.
+
+"Jambo bwana m'kubwa kabeesa sana (greeting, mightiest possible
+master)!" it came.
+
+Then in due course he delicately hinted that a gift of tobacco would not
+come amiss.
+
+F. returned a trifle earlier than usual, to admit that his quest was
+hopeless, that his physical forces were for the time being at an end,
+and that he was willing to go home.
+
+Accordingly very early next morning we set out by the glimmer of a
+lantern, hoping to get a good start on our journey before the heat of
+the day became too severe. We did gain something, but performed several
+unnecessary loops and semicircles in the maze of beaten paths before we
+finally struck into one that led down the slope towards the sea. Shortly
+after the dawn came up "like thunder" in its swiftness, followed almost
+immediately by the sun.
+
+Our way now led along the wide flat between the seashore and the Shimba
+Hills, in which we had been hunting. A road ten feet wide and innocent
+of wheels ran with obstinate directness up and down the slight contours
+and through the bushes and cocoanut groves that lay in its path. So
+mathematically straight was it that only when perspective closed it in,
+or when it dropped over the summit of a little rise, did the eye lose
+the effect of its interminability. The country through which this road
+led was various--open bushy veld with sparse trees, dense jungle,
+cocoanut groves, tall and cool. In the shadows of the latter were the
+thatched native villages. To the left always ran the blue Shimba Hills;
+and far away to the right somewhere we heard the grumbling of the sea.
+
+Every hundred yards or so we met somebody. Even thus early the road was
+thronged. By far the majority were the almost naked natives of the
+district, pleasant, brown-skinned people with good features. They
+carried things. These things varied from great loads balanced atop to
+dainty impromptu baskets woven of cocoa-leaves and containing each a
+single cocoanut. They smiled on us, returned our greeting, and stood
+completely aside to let us pass. Other wayfarers were of more
+importance. Small groups of bearded dignitaries, either upper-class
+Swahili or pure Arabs, strolled slowly along, apparently with limitless
+leisure, but evidently bound somewhere, nevertheless. They replied to
+our greetings with great dignity. Once, also, we overtook a small
+detachment of Sudanese troops moving. They were scattered over several
+miles of road. A soldier, most impressive and neat in khaki and red
+tarboosh and sash; then two or three of his laughing, sleek women, clad
+in the thin, patterned "'Mericani," glittering with gold ornaments; then
+a half dozen ragged porters carrying official but battered painted
+wooden kit boxes, or bags, or miscellaneous curious plunder; then more
+troopers; and so on for miles. They all drew aside for us most
+respectfully; and the soldiers saluted, very smart and military.
+
+Under the broad-spreading mangoes near the villages we came upon many
+open markets in full swing. Each vendor squatted on his heels behind his
+wares, while the purchasers or traders wandered here and there making
+offers. The actual commerce compared with the amount of laughing,
+joking, shrieking joy of the occasion as one to a thousand.
+
+Generally three or four degenerate looking dirty East Indians slunk
+about, very crafty, very insinuating, very ready and skilful to take
+what advantages they could. I felt a strong desire to kick every one of
+them out from these joyful concourses of happy people. Generally we sat
+down for a while in these markets, and talked to the people a little,
+and perhaps purchased some of the delicious fruit. They had a small
+delicate variety of banana, most wonderful, the like of which I have
+seen nowhere else. We bought forty of these for a coin worth about eight
+cents. Besides fruit they offered cocoanuts in all forms, grain, woven
+baskets, small articles of handicraft--and fish. The latter were farther
+from the sea than they should have been! These occasional halts greatly
+refreshed us for more of that endless road.
+
+For all this time we were very hot. As the sun mounted, the country
+fairly steamed. From the end of my rifle barrel, which I carried across
+my forearm, a steady trickle of water dripped into the road. We neither
+of us had a dry stitch on us, and our light garments clung to us
+thoroughly wet through. At first we tried the military method, and
+marched fifty minutes to rest ten, but soon discovered that twenty-five
+minutes' work to five minutes off was more practical. The sheer weight
+of the sun was terrific; after we had been exposed to it for any great
+length of time--as across several wide open spaces--we entered the
+steaming shade of the jungle with gratitude. At the end of seven hours,
+however, we most unexpectedly came through a dense cocoanut grove plump
+on the banks of the harbour at Kilindini.
+
+Here, after making arrangements for the transport of our safari, when it
+should arrive, we entrusted ourselves to a small boy and a cranky boat.
+An hour later, clad in tropical white, with cool drinks at our elbows,
+we sat in easy-chairs on the veranda of the Mombasa Club.
+
+The clubhouse is built on a low cliff at the water's edge. It looks
+across the blue waters of the bay to a headland crowned with
+cocoa-palms, and beyond the headland to the Indian Ocean. The cool
+trades sweep across that veranda. We idly watched a lone white oarsman
+pulling strongly against the wind through the tide rips, evidently bent
+on exercise. We speculated on the incredible folly of wanting exercise;
+and forgot him. An hour later a huge saffron yellow squall rose from
+China 'cross the way, filled the world with an unholy light, lashed the
+reluctant sea to white-caps, and swooped screaming on the cocoa-palms.
+Police boats to rescue the idiot oarsman! Much minor excitement! Great
+rushing to and fro! We continued to sit in our lounging chairs, one hand
+on our cool long drinks.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[4] For a fuller discussion, see "The Land of Footprints."
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+THE FIRE.
+
+
+We were very tired, so we turned in early. W Unfortunately, our rooms
+were immediately over the billiard room, where a bibulous and
+cosmopolitan lot were earnestly endeavouring to bolster up by further
+proof the fiction that a white man cannot retain his health in the
+tropics. The process was pretty rackety, and while it could not keep us
+awake, it prevented us from falling thoroughly asleep. At length, and
+suddenly, the props of noise fell away from me, and I sank into a
+grateful, profound abyss.
+
+Almost at once, however, I was dragged back to consciousness. Mohammed
+stood at my bedside.
+
+"Bwana," he proffered to my rather angry inquiry, "all the people have
+gone to the fire. It is a very large fire. I thought you would like to
+see it."
+
+I glanced out of the window at the reddening sky, thrust my feet into a
+pair of slippers, and went forth in my pyjamas to see what I could see.
+
+We threaded our way through many narrow dark and deserted streets,
+beneath balconies that overhung, past walls over which nodded tufted
+palms, until a loud and increasing murmuring told us we were nearing the
+centre of disturbance. Shortly, we came to the outskirts of the excited
+crowd, and beyond them saw the red furnace glow.
+
+"Semeelay! Semeelay!" warned Mohammed authoritatively; and the
+bystanders, seeing a white face, gave me passage.
+
+All of picturesque Mombasa was afoot--Arabs, Swahilis, Somalis, savages,
+Indians--the whole lot. They moved restlessly in the narrow streets;
+they hung over the edges of balconies; they peered from barred windows;
+interested dark faces turned up everywhere in the flickering light. One
+woman, a fine, erect, biblical figure, stood silhouetted on a flat
+housetop and screamed steadily. I thought she must have at least one
+baby in the fire, but it seems she was only excited.
+
+The fire was at present confined to two buildings, in which it was
+raging fiercely. Its spread, however, seemed certain; and, as it was
+surrounded by warehouses of valuable goods, moving was in full swing. A
+frantic white man stood at the low doorway of one of these dungeon-like
+stores hastening the movements of an unending string of porters. As each
+emerged bearing a case on his shoulder, the white man urged him to a
+trot. I followed up the street to see where these valuables were being
+taken, and what were the precautions against theft. Around the next
+corner, it seemed. As each excited perspiring porter trotted up, he
+heaved his burden from his head or his shoulders, and promptly scampered
+back for another load. They were loyal and zealous men; but their
+headpieces were deficient inside. For the burdens that they saved from
+the fire happened to be cases of gin in bottles. At least, it was in
+bottles until the process of saving had been completed. Then it trickled
+merrily down the gutter. I went back and told the frantic white man
+about it. He threw up both hands to heaven and departed.
+
+By dodging from street to street Mohammed and I succeeded in circling
+the whole disturbance, and so came at length to a public square. Here
+was a vast throng, and a very good place, so I climbed atop a rescued
+bale of cotton the better to see.
+
+Mombasa has no water system, but a wonderful corps of water-carriers.
+These were in requisition to a man. They disappeared down through the
+wide gates of the customs enclosure, their naked, muscular, light-brown
+bodies gleaming with sweat, their Standard Oil cans dangling merrily at
+the ends of slender poles. A moment later they emerged, the cans full of
+salt water from the bay, the poles seeming fairly to butt into their
+bare shoulders as they teetered along at their rapid, swaying, burdened
+gait.
+
+The moment they entered the square they were seized upon from a dozen
+different sides. There was no system at all. Every owner of property was
+out for himself, and intended to get as much of the precious water as he
+could. The poor carriers were pulled about, jerked violently here and
+there, besought, commanded, to bring their loads to one or the other of
+the threatened premises. Vociferations, accusations, commands arose to
+screams. One old graybeard occupied himself by standing on tiptoe and
+screeching, "Maji! maji! maji!" at the top of his voice, as though that
+added anything to the visible supply. The water-carrier of the moment
+disappeared in a swirl of excited contestants. He was attending strictly
+to business, looking neither to right nor to left, pushing forward as
+steadily as he could, gasping mechanically his customary warning,
+"Semeelay! Semeelay!" Somehow, eventually, he and his comrades must have
+got somewhere; for after an interval he returned with empty buckets.
+Then every blessed fool of a property owner took a whack at his bare
+shoulders as he passed, shrieking hysterically, "Haya! haya! pesi!
+pesi!" and the like to men already doing their best. It was a grand
+sight!
+
+In the meantime the fire itself was roaring away. The old graybeard
+suddenly ceased crying "maji," and darted forward to where I stood on
+the bale of cotton. With great but somewhat flurried respect he begged
+me to descend. I did so, somewhat curious as to what he might be up to,
+for the cotton was at least two hundred feet from the fire. Immediately
+he began to tug and heave; the bale was almost beyond his strength; but
+after incredible exertions he lifted one side of it, poised it for a
+moment, got his shoulder under it, and rolled it over once. Then he
+darted away and resumed his raucous cry for water. I climbed back again.
+Thrice more, at intervals, he repeated this performance. The only result
+was to daub with mud every possible side of that bale. I hope it was his
+property.
+
+You must remember that I was observing the heavy artillery of the attack
+on the conflagration. Individual campaigns were everywhere in progress.
+I saw one man standing on the roof of a threatened building. He lowered
+slowly, hand over hand, a small tea-kettle at the end of a string. This
+was filled by a friend in the street, whereupon the man hauled it up
+again, slowly, hand over hand, and solemnly dashed its contents into the
+mouth of the furnace. Thousands of other men on roofs, in balconies, on
+the street, were doing the same thing. Some had ordinary cups which they
+filled a block away! The limit of efficiency was a pail. Nobody did
+anything in concert with anybody else. The sight of these thousands of
+little midgets each with his teacup, or his teapot, or his tin pail,
+throwing each his mite of water--for which he had to walk a street or
+so--into the ravening roaring furnace of flame was as pathetic or as
+comical as you please. They did not seem to have a show in the world.
+
+Nevertheless, to my vast surprise, the old system of the East triumphed
+at last. The system of the East is that if you get _enough_ labour you
+can accomplish anything. Little by little those thousands of tea kettles
+of water had their aggregate effect. The flames fed themselves out and
+died down leaving the contiguous buildings unharmed save for a little
+scorching. In two hours all was safe, and I returned to the hotel,
+having enjoyed myself hugely. I had, however, in the interest and
+excitement, forgotten how deadly is the fever of Mombasa. Midnight in
+pyjamas did the business; and shortly I paid well for the fun.
+
+
+
+
+PART III.
+
+NAIROBI.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+UP FROM THE COAST.
+
+
+Nairobi is situated at the far edge of the great Athi Plains and just
+below a range of hills. It might about as well have been anywhere else,
+and perhaps better a few miles back in the higher country. Whether the
+funny little narrow-gauge railroad exists for Nairobi, or Nairobi for
+the railroad, it would be difficult to say. Between Mombasa and this
+interior placed-to-order town, certainly, there is nothing, absolutely
+nothing, either in passengers or freight, to justify building the line.
+That distance is, if I remember it correctly, about three hundred and
+twenty miles. A dozen or so names of stations appear on the map. These
+are water tanks, telegraph stations, or small groups of tents in which
+dwell black labourers--on the railroad.
+
+The way climbs out from the tropical steaming coast belt to and across
+the high scrub desert, and then through lower rounded hills to the
+plains. On the desert is only dense thorn brush--and a possibility that
+the newcomer, if he looks very closely, may to his excitement see his
+first game in Africa. This is a stray duiker or so, tiny grass antelopes
+a foot high. Also in this land is thirst; so that alongside the
+locomotives, as they struggle up grade, in bad seasons, run natives to
+catch precious drops.[5] An impalpable red dust sifts through and into
+everything. When a man descends at Voi for dinner he finds his
+fellow-travellers have changed complexion. The pale clerk from indoor
+Mombasa has put on a fine healthy sunburn; and the company in general
+present a rich out-of-doors bloom. A chance dab with a white napkin
+comes away like fresh paint, however.
+
+You clamber back into the compartment, with its latticed sun shades and
+its smoked glass windows; you let down the narrow canvas bunk; you
+unfold your rug, and settle yourself for repose. It is a difficult
+matter. Everything you touch is gritty. The air is close and stifling,
+like the smoke-charged air of a tunnel. If you try to open a window you
+are suffocated with more of the red dust. At last you fall into a doze;
+to awaken nearly frozen! The train has climbed into what is, after weeks
+of the tropics, comparative cold; and if you have not been warned to
+carry wraps, you are in danger of pneumonia.
+
+The gray dawn comes, and shortly, in the sudden tropical fashion, the
+full light. You look out on a wide smiling grass country, with dips and
+swales, and brushy river bottoms, and long slopes and hills thrusting up
+in masses from down below the horizon, and singly here and there in the
+immensities nearer at hand. The train winds and doubles on itself up the
+gentle slopes and across the imperceptibly rising plains. But the
+interest is not in these wide prospects, beautiful and smiling as they
+may be, but in the game. It is everywhere. Far in the distance the herds
+twinkle, half guessed in the shimmer of the bottom lands or dotting the
+sides of the hills. Nearer at hand it stares as the train rumbles and
+sways laboriously past. Occasionally it even becomes necessary to
+whistle aside some impertinent kongoni that has placed himself between
+the metals! The newcomer has but a theoretical knowledge at best of all
+these animals; and he is intensely interested in identifying the various
+species. The hartebeeste and the wildebeeste he learns quickly enough,
+and of course the zebra and the giraffe are unmistakable; but the
+smaller gazelles are legitimate subjects for discussion. The wonder of
+the extraordinary abundance of these wild animals mounts as the hours
+slip by. At the stops for water or for orders the passengers gather from
+their different compartments to detail excitedly to each other what they
+have seen. There is always an honest superenthusiast who believes he has
+seen rhinoceroses, lions, or leopards. He is looked upon with envy by
+the credulous, and with exasperation by all others.
+
+So the little train puffs and tugs along. Suddenly it happens on a
+barbed wire fence, and immediately after enters the town of Nairobi. The
+game has persisted right up to that barbed wire fence.
+
+The station platform is thronged with a heterogeneous multitude of
+people. The hands of a dozen raggetty black boys are stretched out for
+luggage. The newcomer sees with delight a savage with a tin can in his
+stretched ear lobe; another with a set of wooden skewers set fanwise
+around the edge of the ear; he catches a glimpse of a beautiful naked
+creature very proud, very decorated with beads and heavy polished wire.
+Then he is ravished away by the friend, or agent, or hotel
+representative who has met him, and hurried out through the gates
+between the impassive and dignified Sikh sentries to the cab. I believe
+nobody but the newcomer ever rides in the cab; and then but once, from
+the station to the hotel. After that he uses rickshaws. In fact it is
+probable that the cab is maintained for the sole purpose of giving the
+newcomer a grand and impressive entrance. This brief fleeting quarter
+hour of glory is unique and passes. It is like crossing the Line, or the
+first kiss, something that in its nature cannot be repeated.
+
+The cab was once a noble vehicle, compounded of opulent curves, with a
+very high driver's box in front, a little let-down bench, and a deep,
+luxurious, shell-shaped back seat, reclining in which one received the
+adulation of the populace. That was in its youth. Now in its age the
+varnish is gone; the upholstery of the back seat frayed; the upholstery
+of the small seat lacking utterly, so that one sits on bare boards. In
+place of two dignifiedly spirited fat white horses, it is drawn by two
+very small mules in a semi-detached position far ahead. And how it
+rattles!
+
+Between the station and the hotel at Nairobi is a long straight wide
+well-made street, nearly a mile long, and bordered by a double row of
+young eucalyptus. These latter have changed the main street of Nairobi
+from the sunbaked array of galvanized houses described by travellers of
+a half dozen years back to a thoroughfare of great charm. The iron
+houses and stores are now in a shaded background; and the attention is
+freed to concentrate on the vivid colouring, the incessant movement, the
+great interest of the people moving to and fro. When I left Nairobi the
+authorities were considering the removal of these trees, because one row
+of them had been planted slightly within the legal limits of the street.
+What they could interfere with in a practically horseless town I cannot
+imagine, but I trust this stupidity gave way to second thought.
+
+The cab rattles and careers up the length of the street, scattering
+rickshaws and pedestrians from before its triumphant path. To the left
+opens a wide street of little booths under iron awnings, hung with gay
+colour and glittering things. The street is thronged from side to side
+with natives of all sorts. It whirls past, and shortly after the cab
+dashes inside a fence and draws up before the low stone-built,
+wide-verandahed hotel.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[5] The Government does much nowadays by means of tank cars.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+A TOWN OF CONTRASTS.
+
+
+It has been, as I have said, the fashion to speak of Nairobi as an ugly
+little town. This was probably true when the first corrugated iron
+houses huddled unrelieved near the railway station. It is not true now.
+The lower part of town is well planted, and is always picturesque as
+long as its people are astir. The white population have built in the
+wooded hills some charming bungalows surrounded by bright flowers or
+lost amid the trunks of great trees. From the heights on which is
+Government House one can, with a glass, watch the game herds feeding on
+the plains. Two clubs, with the usual games of golf, polo,
+tennis--especially tennis--football and cricket; a weekly hunt, with
+jackals instead of foxes; a bungalow town club on the slope of a hill;
+an electric light system; a race track; a rifle range; frilly parasols
+and the latest fluffiest summer toilettes from London and Paris--I
+mention a few of the refinements of civilization that offer to the
+traveller some of the most piquant of contrasts.
+
+For it must not be forgotten that Nairobi, in spite of these things--due
+to the direct but slender thread of communication by railroad and
+ships--is actually in the middle of an African wilderness--is a black
+man's town, as far as numbers go.[6]
+
+The game feeds to its very outskirts, even wanders into the streets at
+night.[7] Lions may be heard roaring within a mile or so of town; and
+leopards occasionally at night come on the verandas of the outlying
+dwellings. Naked savages from the jungle untouched by civilization in
+even the minutest particular wander the streets unabashed.
+
+It is this constantly recurring, sharply drawn contrast that gives
+Nairobi its piquant charm. As one sits on the broad hotel veranda a
+constantly varied pageant passes before him. A daintily dressed,
+fresh-faced Englishwoman bobs by in a smart rickshaw drawn by two
+uniformed runners; a Kikuyu, anointed, curled, naked, brass adorned,
+teeters along, an expression of satisfaction on his face; a horseman,
+well appointed, trots briskly by followed by his loping syce; a string
+of skin-clad women, their heads fantastically shaved, heavily
+ornamented, lean forward under the burden of firewood for the market; a
+beautiful baby in a frilled perambulator is propelled by a tall, solemn,
+fine-looking black man in white robe and cap; the driver of a high cart
+tools his animal past a creaking, clumsy, two-wheeled wagon drawn by a
+pair of small humpbacked native oxen. And so it goes, all day long,
+without end. The public rickshaw boys just across the way chatter and
+game and quarrel and keep a watchful eye out for a possible patron on
+whom to charge vociferously and full tilt. Two or three old-timers with
+white whiskers and red faces continue to slaughter thousands and
+thousands and thousands of lions from the depths of their easy chairs.
+
+The stone veranda of that hotel is a very interesting place. Here gather
+men from all parts of East Africa, from Uganda, and the jungles of the
+Upper Congo. At one time or another all the famous hunters drop into its
+canvas chairs--Cunninghame, Allan Black, Judd, Outram, Hoey, and the
+others; white traders with the natives of distant lands; owners of farms
+experimenting bravely on a greater or lesser scale in a land whose
+difficulties are just beginning to be understood; great naturalists and
+scientists from the governments of the earth, eager to observe and
+collect this interesting and teeming fauna; and sportsmen just out and
+full of interest, or just returned and modestly important. More
+absorbing conversation can be listened to on this veranda than in any
+other one place in the world. The gathering is cosmopolitan; it is
+representative of the most active of every social, political, and racial
+element; it has done things; it contemplates vital problems from the
+vantage ground of experience. The talk veers from pole to pole--and
+returns always to lions.
+
+Every little while a native--a raw savage--comes along and takes up a
+stand just outside the railing. He stands there mute and patient for
+five minutes--a half hour--until some one, any one, happens to notice
+him.
+
+"N'jo!--come here!" commands this person.
+
+The savage silently proffers a bit of paper on which is written the name
+of the one with whom he has business.
+
+"Nenda officie!" indicates the charitable person waving his hand
+towards the hotel office.
+
+Then, and not until this permission has been given by some one, dares
+the savage cross the threshold to do his errand.
+
+If the messenger happens to be a trained houseboy, however, dressed in
+his uniform of khaki or his more picturesque white robe and cap, he is
+privileged to work out his own salvation. And behind the hotel are rows
+and rows of other boys, each waiting patiently the pleasure of his
+especial bwana lounging at ease after strenuous days. At the drawling
+shout of "boy!" one of them instantly departs to find out which
+particular boy is wanted.
+
+The moment any white man walks to the edge of the veranda a half-dozen
+of the rickshaws across the street career madly around the corners of
+the fence, bumping, colliding, careening dangerously, to drop
+beseechingly in serried confusion close around the step. The rickshaw
+habit is very strong in Nairobi. If a man wants to go a hundred yards
+down the street he takes a rickshaw for that stupendous journey. There
+is in justification the legend that the white man should not exert
+himself in the tropics. I fell into the custom of the country until I
+reflected that it would hardly be more fatal to me to walk a half-hour
+in the streets of Nairobi than to march six or seven hours--as I often
+did--when on safari or in the hunting field. After that I got a little
+exercise, to the vast scandal of the rickshaw boys. In fact, so unusual
+was my performance that at first I had fairly to clear myself a way with
+my kiboko. After a few experiences they concluded me a particularly
+crazy person and let me alone.
+
+Rickshaws, however, are very efficient and very cheap. The runners, two
+in number, are lithe little round-headed Kavirondos, generally, their
+heads shaved to leave a skull cap, clad in scant ragged garments, and
+wearing each an anklet of little bells. Their passion for ornament they
+confine to small bright things in their hair and ears. They run easily,
+with a very long stride. Even steep hills they struggle up somehow,
+zigzagging from one side of the road to the other, edging along an inch
+or so at a time. In such places I should infinitely have preferred to
+have walked, but that would have lost me caste everywhere. There are
+limits even to a crazy man's idiosyncrasies. For that reason I never
+thoroughly enjoyed rickshaws, save along the level ways with bells
+jingling and feet patpatting a rapid time. Certainly I did not enjoy
+them going down the steep hills. The boy between the shafts in front
+hits the landscape about every forty feet. I do not really object to
+sudden death, but this form of it seemed unfair to some poor hungry
+lion.
+
+However, the winding smooth roads among the forested, shaded bungalows
+of the upper part of town were very attractive, especially towards
+evening. At that time the universal sun-helmet or double terai could be
+laid aside for straw hats, cloth caps, or bare heads. People played the
+more violent games, or strolled idly. At the hotel there was now a good
+deal of foolish drinking; foolish, because in this climate it is very
+bad for the human system, and in these surroundings of much interest and
+excitement the relief of its exaltation from monotony or ennui or
+routine could hardly be required.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[6] Fifteen hundred whites to twelve thousand natives, approximately.
+
+[7] This happened twice while I was in the country.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+PEOPLE.
+
+
+Considered as a class rather than as individuals, the dark-skinned
+population is easily the more interesting. Considered as individuals,
+the converse is true. Men like Sir Percy Girouard, Hobley, Jackson, Lord
+Delamere, McMillan, Cunninghame, Allan Black, Leslie Tarleton,
+Vanderweyer, the Hill cousins, Horne, and a dozen others are nowhere
+else to be met in so small a community. But the whites have developed
+nothing in their relations one to another essentially different. The
+artisan and shopkeeping class dwell on the flats; the Government people
+and those of military connections live on the heights on one side of the
+little stream; the civil service and bigger business men among the hills
+on the other. Between them all is a little jealousy, and contempt, and
+condescension; just as there is jealousy, and contempt, and
+condescension elsewhere. They are pleasant people, and hospitable, and
+some of them very distinguished in position or achievement; and I am
+glad to say I have good friends among them.
+
+But the native is the joy, and the never-ceasing delight. For his
+benefit is the wide, glittering, colourful, insanitary bazaar, with its
+dozens of little open-air veranda shops, its "hotels" where he can sit
+in a real chair and drink real tea, its cafes, and the dark mysteries of
+its more doubtful amusements. The bazaar is right in the middle of town,
+just where it ought not to be, and it is constantly being quarantined,
+and threatened with removal. It houses a large population mysteriously,
+for it is of slight extent. Then on the borders of town are the two
+great native villages--one belonging to the Somalis, and the other
+hospitably accommodating the swarms of caravan porters and their
+families. For, just as in old days Mombasa and Zanzibar used to be the
+points from which caravans into the interior would set forth, now
+Nairobi outfits the majority of expeditions. Probably ten thousand
+picked natives of various tribes are engaged in the profession. Of
+course but a small proportion of this number is ever at home at any one
+time; but the village is a large one. Both these villages are built in
+the native style, of plaster and thatch; have their own headman
+government--under supervision--and are kept pretty well swept out and
+tidy. Besides these three main gathering places are many camps and
+"shambas"[8] scattered everywhere; and the back country counts millions
+of raw jungle savages, only too glad to drift in occasionally for a look
+at the metropolis.
+
+At first the newcomer is absolutely bewildered by the variety of these
+peoples; but after a little he learns to differentiate. The Somalis are
+perhaps the first recognizable, with their finely chiselled,
+intelligent, delicate brown features, their slender forms, and their
+strikingly picturesque costumes of turbans, flowing robes, and
+embroidered sleeveless jackets. Then he learns to distinguish the savage
+from the sophisticated dweller of the town. Later comes the
+identification of the numerous tribes.
+
+The savage comes in just as he has been for, ethnologists alone can
+guess, how many thousands of years. He is too old an institution to have
+been affected as yet by this tiny spot of modernity in the middle of the
+wilderness. As a consequence he startles the newcomer even more than
+the sight of giraffes on the sky-line.
+
+When the shenzi--wild man--comes to town he gathers in two or three of
+his companions, and presents himself as follows: His hair has been grown
+quite long, then gathered in three tight pigtails wound with leather,
+one of which hangs over his forehead, and the other two over his ears.
+The entire head he has then anointed with a mixture of castor oil and a
+bright red colouring earth. This is wiped away evenly all around the
+face, about two inches below the hair, to leave a broad, bandlike
+glistening effect around the entire head. The ears are most marvellous.
+From early youth the lobes have been stretched, until at last they have
+become like two long elastic loops, hanging down upon the shoulder, and
+capable of accommodating anything up to and including a tomato can. When
+in fatigue uniform these loops are caught up over the tops of the ears,
+but on dress parade they accommodate almost anything considered
+ornamental. I have seen a row of safety pins clasped in them or a number
+of curtain rings; or a marmalade jar, or the glittering cover of a
+tobacco tin. The edges of the ears, all around to the top, are then
+pierced. Then the insertion of a row of long white wooden skewers gives
+one a peculiarly porcupinish look; or a row of little brass danglers
+hints of wealth. Having thus finished off his head, your savage clasps
+around his neck various strings of beads; or collars of iron or copper
+wire, polished to the point of glitter; puts on a half-dozen armlets and
+leglets of the same; ties on a narrow bead belt, in which is thrust a
+short sword; anoints himself all over with reddened castor oil until he
+glistens and shines in the sun; rubs his legs with white clay and traces
+patterns therein; seizes his long-bladed spear, and is ready for the
+city. Oh, no! I forgot--and he probably came near doing so--his strip of
+'Mericani.[9] This was originally white, but constant wear over castor
+oil has turned it a uniform and beautiful brown.
+
+The purpose of this is ornament, and it is so worn. There has been an
+attempt, I understand, to force these innocent children to some sort of
+conventional decency while actually in the streets of Nairobi. It was
+too large an order. Some bring in clothes, to be sure, because the white
+man asks it; but why no sensible man could say. They are hung from one
+shoulder, flap merrily in the breeze, and are always quite frankly
+tucked up about the neck or under the arms when the wearer happens to be
+in haste. As a matter of fact these savages are so beautifully and
+smoothly formed; their red-brown or chocolate-brown skin is so fine in
+texture, and their complete unconsciousness so genuine that in an hour
+the newcomer is quite accustomed to their nakedness.
+
+These proud youths wander mincingly down the street with an expression
+of the most fatuous and good-natured satisfaction with themselves. To
+their minds they have evidently done every last thing that human
+ingenuity or convention could encompass.
+
+These young men are the dandies, the proud young aristocracy of wealth
+and importance; and of course they may differ individually or tribally
+from the sample I have offered. Also there are many other social grades.
+Those who care less for dress or have less to get it with can rub along
+very cheaply. The only real essentials are (_a_) something for the
+ear--a tomato can will do; (_b_) a trifle for clothing--and for that a
+scrap of gunny sacking will be quite enough.
+
+The women to be seen in the streets of Nairobi are mostly of the Kikuyu
+tribe. They are pretty much of a pattern. Their heads are shaven,
+either completely or to leave only ornamental tufts; and are generally
+bound with a fine wire fillet so tightly that the strands seem to sink
+into the flesh. A piece of cotton cloth, dyed dark umber red, is belted
+around the waist, and sometimes, but not always, another is thrown about
+the shoulder. They go in for more hardware than do the men. The entire
+arms and the calves of the legs are encased in a sort of armour made of
+quarter-inch wire wound closely, and a collar of the same material
+stands out like a ruff eight or ten inches around the neck. This is
+wound on for good; and must be worn day and night and all the time, a
+cumbersome and tremendously heavy burden. A dozen large loops of
+coloured beads strung through the ears, and various strings and
+necklaces of beads, cowrie shells, and the like finish them out in all
+their gorgeousness. They would sink like plummets. Their job in life,
+besides lugging all this stuff about, is to carry in firewood and
+forage. At any time of the day long files of them can be seen bending
+forward under their burdens. These they carry on their backs by means of
+a strap across the tops of their heads; after the fashion of the
+Canadian tump line.
+
+The next cut above the shenzi, or wild man, is the individual who has
+been on safari as carrier, or has otherwise been much employed around
+white men. From this experience he has acquired articles of apparel and
+points of view. He is given to ragged khaki, or cast-off garments of all
+sorts, but never to shoes. This hint of the conventional only serves to
+accent the little self-satisfied excursions he makes into barbarism. The
+shirt is always worn outside, the ear ornaments are as varied as ever,
+the head is shaved in strange patterns, a tiny tight tuft on the crown
+is useful as fastening for feathers or little streamers or anything else
+that will wave or glitter. One of these individuals wore a red label he
+had, with patience and difficulty, removed from one of our trunks. He
+had pasted it on his forehead; and it read "Baggage Room. Not Wanted."
+These people are, after all, but modified shenzis. The modification is
+nearly always in the direction of the comic.
+
+Now we step up to a class that would resent being called shenzis as it
+would resent an insult. This is the personal servant class. The members
+are of all tribes, with possibly a slight preponderance of Swahilis and
+Somalis. They are a very clean, well-groomed, self-respecting class,
+with a great deal of dignity, and a great deal of pride in their
+bwanas. Also they are exceedingly likely to degenerate unless ruled with
+a firm hand and a wise head. Very rarely are they dishonest as respects
+the possessions of their own masters. They understand their work
+perfectly, and the best of them get the equivalent of from eight to ten
+dollars a month. Every white individual has one or more of them; even
+the tiny children with their ridiculous little sun helmets are followed
+everywhere by a tall, solemn, white-robed black. Their powers of
+divination approach the uncanny. About the time you begin to think of
+wanting something, and are making a first helpless survey of a boyless
+landscape, your own servant suddenly, mysteriously, and unobtrusively
+appears from nowhere. Where he keeps himself, where he feeds himself,
+where he sleeps you do not know. These beautifully clean, trim,
+dignified people are always a pleasant feature in the varied picture.
+
+The Somalis are a clan by themselves. A few of them condescend to
+domestic service, but the most prefer the free life of traders, horse
+dealers, gunbearers, camel drivers, labour go-betweens, and similar
+guerrilla occupations. They are handsome, dashing, proud, treacherous,
+courageous, likeable, untrustworthy. They career around on their high,
+short-stirruped saddles; they saunter indolently in small groups; they
+hang about the hotel hoping for a dicker of some kind. There is nothing
+of the savage about them, but much of the true barbarism, with the
+barbarian's pride, treachery, and love of colour.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[8] Native farmlets, generally temporary.
+
+[9] White cotton cloth.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+RECRUITING.
+
+
+To the traveller Nairobi is most interesting as the point from which
+expeditions start and to which they return. Doubtless an extended stay
+in the country would show him that problems of administration and
+possibilities of development could be even more absorbing; but such
+things are very sketchy to him at first.
+
+As a usual thing, when he wants porters he picks them out from the
+throng hanging around the big outfitters' establishments. Each man is
+then given a blanket--cotton, but of a most satisfying red--a tin water
+bottle, a short stout cord, and a navy blue jersey. After that ceremony
+he is yours.
+
+But on the occasion of one three months' journey into comparatively
+unknown country we ran up against difficulties. Some two weeks before
+our contemplated start two or three cases of bubonic plague had been
+discovered in the bazaar, and as a consequence Nairobi was quarantined.
+This meant that a rope had been stretched around the infected area, that
+the shops had been closed, and that no native could--officially--leave
+Nairobi. The latter provision affected us; for under it we should be
+unable to get our bearers out.
+
+As a matter of fact, the whole performance--unofficially--was a farce.
+Natives conversed affably at arm's length across the ropes; hundreds
+sneaked in and out of town at will; and from the rear of the infected
+area I personally saw beds, chests, household goods, blankets, and
+clothes passed to friends outside the ropes. When this latter condition
+was reported, in my presence, to the medical officers, they replied that
+this was a matter for police cognizance! But the brave outward show of
+ropes, disinfectants, gorgeous sentries--in front--and official
+inspection went solemnly on. Great, even in Africa, is the god of red
+tape.
+
+Our only possible plan, in the circumstances, was to recruit the men
+outside the town, to camp them somewhere, march them across country to a
+way station, and there embark them. Our goods and safari stores we
+could then ship out to them by train.
+
+Accordingly we rode on bicycles out to the Swahili village.
+
+This is, as I have said, composed of large "beehive" houses thatched
+conically with straw. The roofs extend to form verandas beneath which
+sit indolent damsels, their hair divided in innumerable tiny parts
+running fore and aft like the stripes on a water melon; their figured
+'Mericani garments draped gracefully. As befitted the women of
+plutocrats, they wore much jewellery, some of it set in their noses.
+Most of them did all of nothing, but some sat half buried in narrow
+strips of bright-coloured tissue paper. These they were pasting together
+like rolls of tape, the coloured edges of the paper forming concentric
+patterns on the resultant discs--an infinite labour. The discs, when
+completed, were for insertion in the lobes of the ears.
+
+When we arrived the irregular "streets" of the village were nearly
+empty, save for a few elegant youths, in long kanzuas, or robes of
+cinnamon colour and spotless white, on their heads fezzes or turbans, in
+their hands slender rattan canes. They were very busy talking to each
+other, and of course did not notice the idle beauties beneath the
+verandas.
+
+Hardly had we appeared, however, when mysteriously came forth the
+headman--a bearded, solemn, Arab-like person with a phenomenally ugly
+face but a most pleasing smile. We told him we wanted porters. He
+clapped his hands. To the four young men who answered this summons he
+gave a command. From sleepy indolence they sprang into life. To the four
+cardinal points of the compass they darted away, running up and down the
+side streets, beating on the doors, screaming at the tops of their lungs
+the word "Cazi"[10] over and over again.
+
+The village hummed like a wasps' nest. Men poured from the huts in
+swarms. The streets were filled; the idle sauntering youths were
+swamped, and sunk from view. Clamour and shouting arose where before had
+been a droning silence. The mob beat up to where we stood, surrounding
+us, shouting at us. From somewhere some one brought an old table and two
+decrepit chairs, battered and rickety in themselves, but symbols of
+great authority in a community where nobody habitually used either. Two
+naked boys proudly took charge of our bicycles.
+
+We seated ourselves.
+
+"Fall in!" we yelled.
+
+About half the crowd fell into rough lines. The rest drew slightly to
+one side. Nobody stopped talking for a single instant.
+
+We arose and tackled our job. The first part of it was to segregate the
+applicants into their different tribes.
+
+"Monumwezi hapa!" we yelled; and the command was repeated and repeated
+again by the headman, by his four personal assistants, by a half-dozen
+lesser headmen. Slowly the Monumwezi drew aside. We impressed on them
+emphatically they must stay thus, and went after, in turn, the Baganda,
+the Wakamba, the Swahilis, the Kavirondo, the Kikuyu. When we had them
+grouped, we went over them individually. We punched their chests, we ran
+over all their joints, we examined their feet, we felt their muscles.
+Our victims stood rigidly at inspection, but their numerous friends
+surrounded us closely, urging the claims of the man to our notice. It
+was rather confusing, but we tried to go at it as though we were alone
+in a wilderness. If the man passed muster we motioned him to a rapidly
+growing group.
+
+When we had finished we had about sixty men segregated. Then we went
+over this picked lot again. This time we tried not only to get good
+specimens, but to mix our tribes. At last our count of twenty-nine was
+made up, and we took a deep breath. But to us came one of them
+complaining that he was a Monumwezi, and that we had picked only three
+Monumwezi, and--We cut him short. His contention was quite correct. A
+porter tent holds five, and it does not do to mix tribes.
+Reorganization! Cut out two extra Kavirondos, and include two more
+Monumwezi. "Bass! finished! Now go get your effects. We start
+immediately."
+
+As quickly as it had filled, the street cleared. The rejected dived back
+into their huts, the newly enlisted carriers went to collect their
+baggage. Only remained the headman and his fierce-faced assistants, and
+the splendid youths idling up and down--none of them had volunteered,
+you may be sure--and the damsels of leisure beneath the porticos. Also
+one engaging and peculiar figure hovering near.
+
+This individual had been particularly busy during our recruiting. He had
+hustled the men into line, he had advised us for or against different
+candidates, he had loudly sung my praises as a man to work for,
+although, of course, he knew nothing about me. Now he approached,
+saluted, smiled. He was a tall, slenderly-built person, with
+phenomenally long, thin legs, slightly rounded shoulders, a forward
+thrust, keen face, and remarkably long, slim hands. With these he
+gesticulated much, in a right-angled fashion, after the manner of
+Egyptian hieroglyphical figures. He was in no manner shenzi. He wore a
+fez, a neat khaki coat and shorts, blue puttees and boots. Also a belt
+with leather pockets, a bunch of keys, a wrist watch, and a seal ring.
+His air was of great elegance and social ease. We took him with us as
+C.'s gunbearer. He proved staunch, a good tracker, an excellent hunter,
+and a most engaging individual. His name was Kongoni, and he was a
+Wakamba.
+
+But now we were confronted with a new problem: that of getting our
+twenty-nine chosen ones together again. They had totally disappeared. In
+all directions we had emissaries beating up the laggards. As each man
+reappeared carrying his little bundle, we lined him up with his
+companions. Then when we turned our backs we lost him again; he had
+thought of another friend with whom to exchange farewells. At the long
+last, however, we got them all collected. The procession started, the
+naked boys proudly wheeling our bikes alongside. We saw them fairly
+clear of everything, then turned them over to Kongoni, while we returned
+to Nairobi to see after our effects.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[10] Work.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV. A LION HUNT ON KAPITI.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+AN OSTRICH FARM AT MACHAKOS.
+
+
+This has to do with a lion hunt on the Kapiti Plains. On the veranda at
+Nairobi I had some time previous met Clifford Hill, who had invited me
+to visit him at the ostrich farm he and his cousin were running in the
+mountains near Machakos. Some time later, a visit to Juja Farm gave me
+the opportunity. Juja is only a day's ride from the Hills'. So an
+Africander, originally from the south, Captain D., and I sent across a
+few carriers with our personal effects, and ourselves rode over on
+horseback.
+
+Juja is on the Athi Plains. Between the Athi and Kapiti Plains runs a
+range of low mountains around the end of which one can make his way as
+around a promontory. The Hills' ostrich farm was on the highlands in the
+bay on the other side of the promontory.
+
+It was towards the close of the rainy season, and the rivers were up.
+We had to swim our horses within a half-mile of Juja, and got pretty
+wet. Shortly after crossing the Athi, however, five miles on, we emerged
+on the dry, drained slopes from the hills. Here the grass was long, and
+the ticks plentiful. Our horses' legs and chests were black with them;
+and when we dismounted for lunch we ourselves were almost immediately
+alive with the pests. In this very high grass the game was rather
+scarce, but after we had climbed by insensible grades to the shorter
+growth we began to see many hartebeeste, zebra, and gazelles, and a few
+of the wildebeeste, or brindled gnus. Travel over these great plains and
+through these leisurely low hills is a good deal like coastwise
+sailing--the same apparently unattainable landmarks which, nevertheless,
+are at last passed and left astern by the same sure but insensible
+progress. Thus we drew up on apparently continuous hills, found wide
+gaps between them, crossed them, and turned to the left along the other
+side of the promontory. About five o'clock we came to the Hills'.
+
+The ostrich farm is situated on the very top of a conical rise that
+sticks up like an island close inshore to the semicircle of mountains in
+which end the vast plains of Kapiti. Thus the Hills have at their backs
+and sides these solid ramparts and face westward the immensities of
+space. For Kapiti goes on over the edge of the world to unknown,
+unguessed regions, rolling and troubled like a sea. And from that
+unknown, on very still days, the snowy peak of Kilimanjaro peers out,
+sketched as faintly against the sky as a soap bubble wafted upward and
+about to disappear. Here and there on the plains kopjes stand like
+islands, their stone tops looking as though thrust through the smooth
+prairie surface from beneath. To them meandered long, narrow ravines
+full of low brush, like thin, wavering streaks of gray. On these
+kopjes--each of which had its name--and in these ravines we were to hunt
+lions.
+
+We began the ascent of the cone on which dwelt our hosts. It was one of
+those hills that seem in no part steep, and yet which finally succeed in
+raising one to a considerable height. We passed two ostrich herds in
+charge of savages, rode through a scattered native village, and so came
+to the farm itself, situated on the very summit.
+
+The house consisted of three large circular huts, thatched neatly with
+papyrus stalks, and with conical roofs. These were arranged as a
+triangle, just touching each other; and the space between had been
+roofed over to form a veranda. We were ushered into one of these
+circular rooms. It was spacious and contained two beds, two chairs, a
+dresser, and a table. Its earth floor was completely covered by the
+skins of animals. In the corresponding room, opposite, slept our hosts;
+while the third was the living and dining room. A long table, raw-hide
+bottomed chairs, a large sideboard, bookcases, a long easy settee with
+pillows, gun racks, photographs in and out of frames, a table with
+writing materials, and books and magazines everywhere--not to speak of
+again the skins of many animals completely covering the floor. Out
+behind, in small, separate buildings, laboured the cook, and dwelt the
+stores, the bath-tub, and other such necessary affairs.
+
+As soon as we had consumed the usual grateful lime juice and sparklets,
+we followed our hosts into the open air to look around.
+
+On this high, airy hill top the Hills some day are going to build them a
+real house. In anticipation they have laid out grounds and have planted
+many things. In examining these my California training stood by me. Out
+there, as here, one so often examines his own and his neighbours'
+gardens, not for what they are but for what they shall become. His
+imagination can exalt this tiny seedling to the impressiveness of
+spreading noontime shade; can magnify yonder apparent duplicate to the
+full symmetry of a shrub; can ruthlessly diminish the present importance
+of certain grand and lofty growths to its true status of flower or
+animal. So from a dead uniformity of size he casts forward in the years
+to a pleasing variation of shade, of jungle, of open glade, of flowered
+vista; and he goes away full of expert admiration for "X.'s bully
+garden." With this solid training beneath me I was able on this occasion
+to please immensely.
+
+From the house site we descended the slope to where the ostriches and
+the cattle and the people were in the late sunlight swarming upward from
+the plains pastures below. These people were, to the chief extent,
+Wakamba, quite savage, but attracted here by the justness and fair
+dealing of the Hills. Some of them farmed on shares with the Hills, the
+white men furnishing the land and seed, and the black men the labour;
+some of them laboured on wage; some few herded cattle or ostriches; some
+were hunters and took the field only when, as now, serious business was
+afoot. They had their complete villages, with priests, witch doctors,
+and all; and they seemed both contented and fond of the two white men.
+
+As we walked about we learned much of the ostrich business; and in the
+course of our ten days' visit we came to a better realization of how
+much there is to think of in what appears basically so simple a
+proposition.
+
+In the nesting time, then, the Hills went out over the open country,
+sometimes for days at a time, armed with long high-power telescopes.
+With these fearsome and unwieldy instruments they surveyed the country
+inch by inch from the advantage of a kopje. When thus they discovered a
+nest, they descended and appropriated the eggs. The latter, hatched at
+home in an incubator, formed the nucleus of a flock.
+
+Pass the raising of ostrich chicks to full size through the difficulties
+of disease, wild beasts, and sheer cussedness. Of the resultant thirty
+birds or so of the season's catch, but two or three will even promise
+good production. These must be bred in captivity with other likely
+specimens. Thus after several years the industrious ostrich farmer may
+become possessed of a few really prime birds. To accumulate a proper
+flock of such in a new country is a matter of a decade or so. Extra
+prime birds are as well known and as much in demand for breeding as any
+blood horse in a racing country. Your true ostrich enthusiast, like the
+Hills, possesses trunks full of feathers not good commercially, but
+intensely interesting for comparison and for the purposes of prophecy.
+While I stayed with them came a rumour of a very fine plucking a distant
+neighbour had just finished from a likely two-year-old. The Hills were
+manifestly uneasy until one of them had ridden the long distance to
+compare this newcomer's product with that of their own two-year-olds.
+And I shall never forget the reluctantly admiring shake of the head with
+which he acknowledged that it was indeed a "very fine feather!"
+
+But getting the birds is by no means all of ostrich farming, as many
+eager experimenters have discovered to their cost. The birds must have a
+certain sort of pasture land; and their paddocks must be built on an
+earth that will not soil or break the edges of the new plumes.
+
+And then there is the constant danger of wild beasts. When a man has
+spent years in gathering suitable flocks, he cannot be blamed for wild
+anger when, as happened while I was in the country, lions kill sixty or
+seventy birds in a night. The ostrich seems to tempt lions greatly. The
+beasts will make their way through and over the most complicated
+defences. Any ostrich farmer's life is a constant warfare against them.
+Thus the Hills had slain sixty-eight lions in and near their farm--a
+tremendous record. Still the beasts continued to come in. My hosts
+showed me, with considerable pride, their arrangements finally evolved
+for night protection.
+
+The ostriches were confined in a series of heavy corrals, segregating
+the birds of different ages. Around the outside of this group of
+enclosures ran a wide ring corral in which were confined the numerous
+cattle; and as an outer wall to this were built the huts of the Wakamba
+village. Thus to penetrate to the ostriches the enterprising lion would
+have to pass both the people, the cattle, and the strong thorn and log
+structures that contained them.
+
+This subject brings me to another set of acquaintances we had already
+made--the dogs.
+
+These consisted of an Airedale named Ruby; two setters called Wayward
+and Girlie; a heavy black mongrel, Nero; ditto brindle, Ben; and a
+smaller black and white ditto, Ranger. They were very nice friendly
+doggy dogs, but they did not look like lion hunters. Nevertheless, Hill
+assured us that they were of great use in the sport, and promised us
+that on the following day we should see just how.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+THE FIRST LIONESS.
+
+
+At an early hour we loaded our bedding, food, tents, and camp outfit on
+a two-wheeled wagon drawn by four of the humpbacked native oxen, and
+sent it away across the plains, with instructions to make camp on a
+certain kopje. Clifford Hill and myself, accompanied by our gunbearers
+and syces, then rode leisurely down the length of a shallow brushy cañon
+for a mile or so. There we dismounted and sat down to await the arrival
+of the others. These--including Harold Hill, Captain D., five or six
+Wakamba spearmen, our own carriers, and the dogs--came along more
+slowly, beating the bottoms on the off chance of game.
+
+The sun was just warming, and the bees and insects were filling the air
+with their sleepy droning sounds. The hillside opposite showed many
+little outcrops of rocks so like the hills of our own Western States
+that it was somewhat difficult to realize that we were in Africa. For
+some reason the delay was long. Then suddenly all four of us
+simultaneously saw the same thing. A quarter-mile away and on the
+hillside opposite a magnificent lioness came loping easily along through
+the grass. She looked very small at that distance, like a toy, and quite
+unhurried. Indeed, every few moments she paused to look back in an
+annoyed fashion over her shoulder in the direction of the row behind
+her.
+
+There was nothing to do but sit tight and wait. The lioness was headed
+exactly to cross our front; nor, except at one point, was she at all
+likely to deviate. A shallow tributary ravine ran into our own about two
+hundred yards away. She might possibly sneak down the bed of this. It
+seemed unlikely. The going was bad, and in addition she had no idea as
+yet that she had been sighted. Indeed, the chances were that she would
+come to a definite stop before making the crossing, in which case we
+would get a shot.
+
+"And if she does go down the donga," whispered Hill, "the dogs will
+locate her."
+
+Sitting still while things approach is always exciting. This is true of
+ducks; but when you multiply ducks by lions it is still more true. We
+all crouched very low in the grass. She leapt without hesitation into
+the ravine--and did not emerge.
+
+This was a disappointment. We concluded she must have entered the stream
+bottom, and were just about to move when Memba Sasa snapped his fingers.
+His sharp eyes had discovered her sneaking along, belly to the ground,
+like the cat she was. The explanation of this change in her gait was
+simple. Our companions had rounded the corner of the hill and were
+galloping in plain view a half-mile away. The lioness had caught sight
+of them.
+
+She was gliding by, dimly visible, through thick brush seventy yards
+distant. Now I could make out a tawny patch that faded while I looked;
+now I could merely guess at a melting shadow.
+
+"Stir her up," whispered Hill. "Never mind whether you hit. She'll sneak
+away."
+
+At the shot she leaped fully out into the open with a snarl. Promptly I
+planted a Springfield bullet in her ribs. She answered slightly to the
+hit, but did not shift position. Her head up, her tail thrashing from
+side to side, her ears laid back, she stood there looking the landscape
+over carefully point by point. She was searching for us, but as yet
+could not locate us. It was really magnificent.
+
+I attempted to throw in another cartridge, but because of my desire to
+work the bolt quietly, in order not to attract the lioness's attention,
+I did not pull it back far enough, and the cartridge jammed in the
+magazine. As evidence of Memba Sasa's coolness and efficiency, it is to
+be written that he became aware of this as soon as I did. He thrust
+the.405 across my right side, at the same time withdrawing the
+Springfield on the left. The motion was slight, but the lioness caught
+it. Immediately she dropped her head and charged.
+
+For the next few moments, naturally, I was pretty intent on lions.
+Nevertheless a corner of my mind was aware of Memba Sasa methodically
+picking away at the jammed rifle, and paying no attention whatever to
+the beast. Also I heard Hill making picturesque remarks about his
+gunbearer, who had bolted with his second gun.
+
+The lioness charged very fast, but very straight, about in the tearing,
+scrambling manner of a terrier after a thrown ball. I got in the first
+shot as she came, the bullet ranging back from the shoulder, and Hill
+followed it immediately with another from his.404 Jeffrey. She growled
+at the bullets, and checked very slightly as they hit, but gave no other
+sign. Then our second shots hit her both together. The mere shock
+stopped her short, but recovering instantly, she sprang forward again.
+Hill's third shot came next, and perceptibly slowed and staggered, but
+did not stop her. By this time she was quite close, and my own third
+shot reached her brain. She rolled over dead.
+
+Decidedly she was a game beast, and stood more hammering than any other
+lion I killed or saw killed. Before the final shot in the brain she had
+taken one light bullet and five heavy ones with hardly a wince. Memba
+Sasa uttered a loud grunt of satisfaction when she went down for good.
+He had the Springfield reloaded and cocked, right at my elbow.
+
+Hill's gunboy hovered uncertainly some distance in the rear. The sight
+of the charging lioness had been too much for him and he had bolted. He
+was not actually up a tree; but he stood very near one. He lost the gun
+and acquired a swift kick.
+
+Our friends and the men now came up. The dogs made a great row over the
+dead lioness. She was measured and skinned to accompaniment of the usual
+low-hummed chantings. We had with us a small boy of ten or twelve years
+whose job it was to take care of the dogs and to remove ticks. In fact
+he was known as the Tick Toto. As this was his first expedition afield,
+his father took especial pains to smear him with fat from the lioness.
+This was to make him brave. I am bound to confess the effect was not
+immediate.
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+THE DOGS.
+
+
+I soon discovered that we were hunting lions with the assistance of the
+dogs; not that the dogs were hunting lions. They had not lost any lions,
+not they! My mental pictures of the snarling, magnificent king of beasts
+surrounded by an equally snarling, magnificent pack vanished into thin
+air.
+
+Our system was to cover as much likely country as we could, and to let
+the dogs have a good time. As I have before indicated, they were
+thoroughly doggy dogs, and interested in everything--except able-bodied
+lions. None of the stick-at-your-heels in their composition. They ranged
+far and wide through all sorts of cover, seeking what they could find in
+the way of porcupines, mongoose, hares, birds, cats, and whatever else
+should interest any healthy-minded dog. If there happened to be any
+lions in the path of these rangings, the dogs retired rapidly,
+discreetly, and with every symptom of horrified disgust. If a dog came
+sailing out of a thicket, ki-yi-ing agitatedly, and took up his
+position, tail between his legs, behind his master, we knew there was
+probably a lion about. Thus we hunted lions with dogs.
+
+But in order to be fair to these most excellent canines, it should be
+recorded that they recovered a certain proportion of their nerve after a
+rifle had been fired. They then returned warily to the--not
+attack--reconnaissance. This trait showed touching faith, and was a real
+compliment to the marksmanship of their masters. Some day it will be
+misplaced. A little cautious scouting on their part located the wounded
+beast; whereupon, at a respectful distance, they lifted their voices. As
+a large element of danger in case of a wounded lion is the uncertainty
+as to his whereabouts, it will be seen that the dogs were very valuable
+indeed. They seemed to know exactly how badly hit any animal might
+happen to be, and to gauge their distance accordingly, until at last,
+when the quarry was hammered to harmlessness, they closed in and began
+to worry the nearly lifeless carcass. By this policy the dogs had a lot
+of fun hunting on their own hook, preserved their lives from otherwise
+inevitable extinction, and were of great assistance in saving their
+masters' skins.
+
+One member of the pack, perhaps two, were, however, rather pathetic
+figures. I refer to the setters, Wayward and Girlie. Ranger, Ruby, Ben,
+and Nero scampered merrily over the landscape after anything that
+stirred, from field mice to serval cats. All was game to their catholic
+tastes; and you may be sure, in a country like Africa, they had few dull
+moments. But Wayward and Girlie had been brought up in a more exclusive
+manner. Their early instincts had been supplemented by a rigorous early
+training. Game to them meant birds, and birds only. Furthermore, they
+had been solemnly assured by human persons in whom they had the utmost
+confidence, that but one sequence of events was permissible or even
+thinkable in the presence of game. The Dog at first intimation by scent
+must convey the fact to the Man, must proceed cautiously to locate
+exactly, must then stiffen to a point which he must hold staunchly, no
+matter how distracting events might turn out, or how long an interval
+might elapse. The Man must next walk up the birds; shoot at them,
+perhaps kill one, then command the Dog to retrieve. The Dog must on no
+account move from his tracks until such command is given. All the affair
+is perfectly simple; but quite inflexible. Any variation in this
+procedure fills the honest bird dog's mind with the same horror and
+dismay experienced by a well-brought-up young man who discovers that he
+has on shoes of the wrong colour. It isn't done, you know.
+
+Consider, then, Wayward and Girlie in a country full of game birds. They
+quarter wide to right, then cross to left, their heads high, their
+feather tails waving in the most approved good form. When they find
+birds they draw to their points in the best possible style; stiffen
+out--and wait. It is now, according to all good ethics, up to the Man.
+And the Man and his companions go right on by, paying absolutely no
+attention either to the situation or one's own magnificent piece of
+work! What is one to conclude? That our early training is all wrong?
+that we are at one experience to turn apostate to the settled and only
+correct order of things? Or that our masters are no gentlemen? That is a
+pretty difficult thing, an impossible thing, to conclude of one's own
+master. But it leaves one in a fearful state mentally; and one has no
+idea of what to do!
+
+Wayward was a perfect gentleman, and he played the game according to
+the very best traditions. He conscientiously pointed every bird he could
+get his nose on. Furthermore he was absolutely staunch, and held his
+point even when the four non-bird dogs rushed in ahead of him. The
+expression of puzzlement, grief, shock, and sadness in his eyes deepened
+as bird after bird soared away without a shot. Girlie was more
+liberal-minded. She pointed her birds, and backed Wayward at need, but
+when the other dogs rushed her point, she rushed too. And when we swept
+on by her, leaving her on point, instead of holding it quixotically, as
+did Wayward, until the bird sneaked away, she merely waited until we
+were out of sight, and then tried to catch it. Finally Captain D.
+remarked that, lions or no lions, he was not going to stand it any
+longer. He got out a shotgun, and all one afternoon killed grouse over
+Wayward, to the latter's intense relief. His ideals had been
+rehabilitated.
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+BONDONI.
+
+
+We followed many depressions, in which might be lions, until about three
+o'clock in the afternoon. Then we climbed the gently-rising long slope
+that culminated, far above the plains, in the peak of a hill called
+Bondoni. From a distance it was steep and well defined; but, like most
+of these larger kopjes, its actual ascent, up to the last few hundred
+feet, was so gradual that we hardly knew we were climbing. At the summit
+we found our men and the bullock cart. There also stood an oblong
+blockhouse of stone, the walls two feet thick and ten feet high. It was
+entered only by a blind angle passage, and was strong enough,
+apparently, to resist small artillery. This structure was simply an
+ostrich corral, and bitter experience had shown the massive construction
+absolutely necessary as adequate protection, in this exposed and
+solitary spot, against the lions.
+
+We had some tea and bread and butter, and then Clifford Hill and I set
+out afoot after meat. Only occasionally do these hard-working settlers
+get a chance for hunting on the plains so near them; and now they had
+promised their native retainers that they would send back a treat of
+game. To carry this promised luxury, a number of the villagers had
+accompanied the bullock wagon. As we were to move on next day, it became
+very desirable to get the meat promptly while still near home.
+
+We slipped over to the other side, and by good fortune caught sight of a
+dozen zebras feeding in scrub half-way down the hill. They were out of
+their proper environment up there, but we were glad of it. Down on our
+tummies, then, we dropped, and crawled slowly forward through the high,
+sweet grasses. We were in the late afternoon shadow of the hill, and we
+enjoyed the mild skill of the stalk. Taking advantage of every cover,
+slipping over into little ravines, lying very flat when one of the
+beasts raised his head, we edged nearer and nearer. We were already well
+within range, but it amused us to play the game. Finally, at one hundred
+yards, we came to a halt. The zebra showed very handsome at that range,
+for even their smaller leg stripes were all plainly visible. Of course
+at that distance there could be small chance of missing, and we owned
+one each. The Wakamba, who had been watching eagerly, swarmed down,
+shouting.
+
+We dined just at sunset under a small tree at the very top of the peak.
+Long bars of light shot through the western clouds; the plain turned
+from solid earth to a mysterious sea of shifting twilights; the buttes
+stood up, wrapped in veils of soft desert colours; Kilimanjaro hung
+suspended like a rose-coloured bubble above the abyss beyond the world.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+RIDING THE PLAINS.
+
+
+From the mere point of view of lions, lion A hunting was very slow work
+indeed. It meant riding the whole of long days, from dawn until dark,
+investigating miles of country that looked all alike and in which we
+seemed to get nowhere. One by one the long billows of plain fell behind,
+until our camp hill had turned blue behind us, and we seemed to be out
+in illimitable space, with no possibility, in an ordinary lifetime, of
+ever getting in touch with anything again. What from above had looked as
+level as a floor now turned into a tremendously wide and placid ground
+swell. As a consequence we were always going imperceptibly up and up and
+up to a long-delayed sky-line, or tipping as gently down the other side
+of the wave. From crest to crest of these long billows measured two or
+three miles. The vertical distance in elevation from trough to top was
+perhaps not over fifty to one hundred feet.
+
+Slowly we rode along the shallow grass and brush ravines in the troughs
+of the low billows, while the dogs worked eagerly in and out of cover,
+and our handful of savages cast stones and shouted. Occasionally we
+divided forces, and beat the length of a hill, two of us lying in wait
+at one end for the possible lion, the rest sweeping the sides and
+summits. Many animals came bounding along, but no lions. Then Harold
+Hill, unlimbering a huge, many-jointed telescope, would lie flat on his
+back, and sight the fearsome instrument over his crossed feet, in a
+general bird's-eye view of the plains for miles around. While he was at
+it we were privileged to look about us, less under the burden of
+responsibility. We could make out the game as little, light-coloured
+dots and speckles, thousands upon thousands of them, thicker than cattle
+ever grazed on the open range, and as far as the eye could make them
+out, and then a glance through our glasses picked them up again for mile
+after mile. Even the six-power could go no farther. The imagination was
+left the vision of more leagues of wild animals even to the half-guessed
+azure mountains--and beyond. I had seen abundant game elsewhere in
+Africa, but nothing like the multitudes inhabiting the Kapiti Plains at
+that time of year. In other seasons this locality is comparatively
+deserted.
+
+The glass revealing nothing in our line, we rode again to the lower
+levels, and again took up our slow, painstaking search.
+
+But although three days went by in this manner without our getting a
+glimpse of lions, they were far from being days lost. Minor adventure
+filled our hours. What elsewhere would be of major interest and strange
+and interesting experience met us at every turn. The game, while
+abundant, was very shy. This had nothing to do with distrust of hunters,
+but merely with the fact that it was the season of green grass. We liked
+to come upon animals unexpectedly, to see them buck-jump and cavort.
+
+Otherwise we rode in a moving space cleared of animals, the beasts
+unobtrusively giving way before us, and as unobtrusively closing in
+behind. The sun flashed on the spears of savages travelling single file
+across the distance. Often we stopped short to gaze upon a wild and
+tumbled horizon of storm that Gustave Doré might have drawn.
+
+The dogs were always joyously routing out some beast, desirable from
+their point of view, and chasing it hopelessly about, to our great
+amusement. Once they ran into a giant porcupine-about the size a setter
+would be, with shorter legs-which did not understand running away. They
+came upon it in a dense thicket, and the ensuing row was unholy. They
+managed to kill the porcupine among them, after which we plucked barbed
+quills from some very grieved dogs. The quills were large enough to make
+excellent penholders. The dogs also swore by all canine gods that they
+wouldn't do a thing to a hyena, if only they could get hold of one. They
+never got hold of one, for the hyena is a coward. His skull and teeth,
+however, are as big and powerful as those of a lioness; so I do not know
+which was luckier in his avoidance of trouble--he or the dogs.
+
+Nor from the shooting standpoint did we lack for sport. We had to shoot
+for our men, and we occasionally needed meat ourselves. It was always
+interesting, when such necessities arose, to stalk the shy buck and do
+long-range rifle practice. This shooting, however, was done only after
+the day's hunt was over. We had no desire to spoil our lion chances.
+
+The long circle towards our evening camp always proved very long indeed.
+We arrived at dusk to find supper ready for us. As we were old
+campaigners we ate this off chop boxes as tables, and sat on the ground.
+It was served by a Wakamba youth we had nicknamed Herbert Spencer, on
+account of his gigantic intellect. Herbert meant well, but about all he
+succeeded in accomplishing was a pathetically wrinkled brow of care and
+scared eyes. He had never been harshly treated by any of us, but he
+acted as though always ready to bolt. If there were twenty easy right
+methods of doing a thing and one difficult wrong method, Herbert would
+get the latter every time. No amount of experience could teach him the
+logic of our simplest ways. One evening he brought a tumbler of mixed
+water and condensed milk. Harold Hill glanced into the receptacle.
+
+"Stir it," he commanded briefly.
+
+Herbert Spencer obeyed. We talked about something else. Some five or ten
+minutes later one of us noticed that Herbert was still stirring, and
+called attention to the fact. When the latter saw our eyes were on him
+he speeded up until the spoon fairly rattled in the tumbler. Then, when
+he thought our attention had relaxed again, he relaxed also his
+efforts--the spoon travelled slower and slower in its dreamy circle. We
+amused ourselves for some time thus. Then we became so weak from
+laughter that we fell backward off our seats, and some one gasped a
+command that Herbert cease.
+
+I am afraid, after a little, that we rather enjoyed mildly tormenting
+poor Herbert Spencer. He tried so hard, and looked so scared, and was so
+unbelievably stupid! Almost always he had to pick his orders word by
+word from a vast amount of high-flown, unnecessary English.
+
+"O Herbert Spencer," the command would run, "if you would condescend to
+bend your mighty intellect to the lowly subject of maji, and will snatch
+time from your profound cerebrations to assure its being moto sans, I
+would esteem it infinite condescension on your part to let pesi pesi."
+
+And Herbert, listening to all this with a painful, strained intensity,
+would catch the six-key words, and would falter forth a trembling "N'dio
+bwana."
+
+Somewhere down deep within Herbert Spencer's make up, however, was a
+sense of moral duty. When we finally broke camp for good, on the great
+hill of Lucania, Herbert Spencer, relieved from his job, bolted like a
+shot. As far as we could see him he was running at top speed. If he had
+not possessed a sense of duty, he would have done this long ago.
+
+We camped always well up on some of the numerous hills; for, although
+anxious enough to find lions in the daytime, we had no use for them at
+all by night. This usually meant that the boys had to carry water some
+distance. We kept a canvas bath-tub full for the benefit of the dogs,
+from which they could drink at any time. This necessary privilege after
+a hard day nearly drove Captain D. crazy. It happened like this:
+
+We were riding along the slope of a hillside, when in the ravine, a half
+mile away and below us, we saw something dark pop up in sight and then
+down again. We shouted to some of the savage Wakamba to go and
+investigate. They closed in from all sides, their long spears poised to
+strike. At the last moment out darted, not an animal, but a badly
+frightened old man armed with bow and arrow. He dashed out under the
+upraised spears, clasped one of the men around the knees, and implored
+protection. Our savages, their spears ready, glanced over their
+shoulders for instruction. They would have liked nothing better than to
+have spitted the poor old fellow.
+
+We galloped down as fast as possible to the rescue. With reluctance our
+spearmen drew back, releasing their prize. We picked up his scattered
+bows and arrows, restored them to him, and uttered many reassurances. He
+was so badly frightened that he could not stand for the trembling of his
+knees. Undoubtedly he thought that war had broken out, and that he was
+the first of its unconscious victims. After calming him down, we told
+him what we were doing, and offered to shoot him meat if he cared to
+accompany us. He accepted the offer with joy. So pleased and relieved
+was he, that he skipped about like a young and nimble goat. His hunting
+companion, who all this time had stood atop of a hill at a safe
+distance, viewed these performances with concern. Our captive shouted
+loudly for him to come join us and share in the good fortune. Not he! He
+knew a trap when he saw one! Not a bit disturbed by the tales this man
+would probably carry back home, our old fellow attached himself to us
+for three days!
+
+Near sundown, to make our promise good, and also to give our own men a
+feast, I shot two hartebeeste near camp.
+
+The evening was beautiful. The Machakos Range, miles distant across the
+valley, was mantled with thick, soft clouds. From our elevation we could
+see over them, and catch the glow of moonlight on their upper surfaces.
+We were very tired, so we turned in early and settled ourselves for a
+good rest.
+
+Outside our tent the little "Injun fire" we had built for our own
+comfort died down to coals. A short distance away, however, was a huge
+bonfire around which all the savages were gathered. They squatted
+comfortably on their heels, roasting meat. Behind each man was planted
+his glittering long-bladed spear. The old man held the place of honour,
+as befitted his flirtation with death that morning. Everybody was
+absolutely happy--a good fire, plenty of meat, and strangers with whom
+to have a grand "shauri." The clatter of tongues was a babel, for almost
+every one talked at once and excitedly. Those who did not talk crooned
+weird, improvised chants, in which they detailed the doings of the camp.
+
+We fell very quickly into the half doze of too great exhaustion. It
+never became more than a half doze. I suppose every one who reads this
+has had at some time the experience of dropping asleep to the
+accompaniment of some noise that ought soon to cease--a conversation in
+the next room, singing, the barking of a dog, the playing of music, or
+the like. The fact that it ought soon to cease, permits the falling
+asleep. When, after an interval, the subconsciousness finds the row
+still going on, inexcusable and unabated, it arouses the victim to
+staring exasperation. That was our case here. Those natives should have
+turned in for sleep after a reasonable amount of pow-wow. They did
+nothing of the kind. On the contrary, I dragged reluctantly back to
+consciousness and the realization that they had quite happily settled
+down to make a night of it. I glanced across the little tent to where
+Captain D. lay on his cot. He was staring straight upward, his eyes wide
+open.
+
+After a few seconds he slipped out softly and silently. Our little fire
+had sunk to embers. A dozen sticks radiated from the centre of coals.
+Each made a firebrand with one end cool to the grasp. Captain D. hurled
+one of these at the devoted and unconscious group.
+
+It whirled through the air and fell plunk in the other fire, scattering
+sparks and coals in all directions. The second was under way before the
+first had landed. It hit a native with similar results, plus astonished
+and grieved language. The rest followed in rapid-magazine-fire. Every
+one hit its mark fair and square. The air was full of sparks exploding
+in all directions. The brush was full of Wakamba, their blankets
+flapping in the breeze of their going. The convention was adjourned.
+There fell the sucking vacuum of a great silence. Captain D., breathing
+righteous wrath, flopped heavily and determinedly down on his cot. I
+caught a faint snicker from the tent next door.
+
+Captain D. sighed deeply, turned over, and prepared to sleep. Then one
+of the dogs uprose--I think it was Ben--stretched himself, yawned,
+approached deliberately, and began to drink from the canvas bath-tub
+just outside. He drank--lap, lap, lap, lap--for a very long time. It
+seemed incredible that any mere dog--or canvas bath-tub--could hold so
+much water. The steady repetition of this sound long after it should
+logically have ceased was worse than the shenzi gathering around the
+fire. Each lap should have been the last, but it was not. The shenzi
+convention had been abated with firebrands, but the dog was strictly
+within his rights. The poor pups had had a long day with little water,
+and they could hardly be blamed for feeling a bit feverish now. At last
+Ben ceased. Next morning Captain D. claimed vehemently that he had drunk
+two hours forty-nine minutes and ten seconds. With a contented sigh Ben
+lay down. Then Ruby got up, shook herself, and yawned. A bright idea
+struck her. She too went over and had a drink. After that I, personally,
+went to sleep. But in the morning I found Captain D. staring-eyed and
+strung nearly to madness, trying feverishly to calculate how seven dogs
+drinking on an average of three hours apiece could have finished by
+morning. When Harold Hill innocently asked if he had slept well, the
+captain threw the remaining but now extinct firebrand at him.
+
+One of the safari boys, a big Baganda, had twisted his foot a little,
+and it had swelled up considerably. In the morning he came to have it
+attended to. The obvious treatment was very hot water and rest; but it
+would never do to tell him so. The recommendation of so simple a remedy
+would lose me his faith. So I gave him a little dab of tick ointment
+wrapped in a leaf.
+
+"This," said I, "is most wonderful medicine; but it is also most
+dangerous. If you were to rub it on your foot or your hand or any part
+of you, that part would drop off. But if you wash the part in very hot
+water continuously for a half hour, and then put on the medicine, it is
+good, and will cure you very soon." I am sure I do not know what they
+put in tick ointment; nor, for the purpose, did it greatly matter. That
+night, also, Herbert Spencer reached the climax of his absurdities. The
+chops he had cooked did not quite suffice for our hunger, so we
+instructed him to give us some of the leg. By this we meant steak, of
+course. Herbert Spencer was gone so long a time that finally we went to
+see what possibly could be the matter. We found him trying desperately
+to cook the whole leg in a frying-pan!
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+THE SECOND LIONESS.
+
+
+Now our luck changed most abruptly. We had been riding since early
+morning over the wide plains. By and by we came to a wide, shallow,
+flood-water course carpeted with lava boulders and scant, scattered
+brush. Two of us took one side of it, and two the other. At this we were
+just within hailing distance. The boys wandered down the middle.
+
+Game was here very abundant, and in this broken country proved quite
+approachable. I saw one Grant's gazelle head, in especial, that greatly
+tempted me; but we were hunting lions, and other shooting was out of
+place. Also the prospects for lions had brightened, for we were
+continually seeing hyenas in packs of from three to six. They lay among
+the stones, but galloped away at our approach. The game paid not the
+slightest attention to these huge, skulking brutes. One passed within
+twenty feet of a hartebeeste; the latter hardly glanced at him. As the
+hyena is lazy as well as cowardly, and almost never does his killing, we
+inferred a good meat supply to gather so many of them in one place. From
+a tributary ravine we flushed nineteen!
+
+Harold Hill was riding with me on the right bank. His quick eye caught a
+glimpse of something beyond our companions on the left side. A glance
+through the glasses showed me that it was a lion, just disappearing over
+the hill. At once we turned our horses to cross. It was a heavy job. We
+were naturally in a tremendous hurry; and the footing among those
+boulders and rounded rocks was so vile that a very slow trot was the
+best we could accomplish. And that was only by standing in our stirrups,
+and holding up our horses' heads by main strength. We reached the
+sky-line in time to see a herd of game stampeding away from a depression
+a half-mile away. We fixed our eyes on that point, and a moment later
+saw the lion or lioness, as it turned out, leap a gully and come out the
+other side.
+
+The footing down this slope, too, was appalling, consisting mainly of
+chunks of lava interspersed with smooth, rounded stones and sparse tufts
+of grass. In spite of the stones we managed a sort of stumbling gallop.
+Why we did not all go down in a heap I do not know. At any rate we had
+no chance to watch our quarry, for we were forced to keep our eyes
+strictly to our way. When finally we emerged from that tumble of rocks,
+she had disappeared.
+
+Either she had galloped out over the plains, or she had doubled back to
+take cover in the ravine. In the latter case she would stand. Our first
+job, therefore, was to determine whether she had escaped over the open
+country. To this end we galloped our horses madly in four different
+directions, pushing them to the utmost, swooping here and there in wide
+circles. That was an exhilarating ten minutes until we had surmounted
+every billow of the plain, spied in all directions, and assured
+ourselves beyond doubt that she had not run off. The horses fairly flew,
+spurning the hard sod, leaping the rock dikes, skipping nimbly around
+the pig holes, turning like cow-ponies under pressure of knee and rein.
+Finally we drew up, converged, and together jogged our sweating horses
+back to the ravine. There we learned from the boys that nothing more had
+been seen of our quarry.
+
+We dismounted, handed our mounts to their syces, and prepared to make
+afoot a clean sweep of the wide, shallow ravine. Here was where the dogs
+came in handy. We left a rearguard of two men, and slowly began our
+beat.
+
+The ravine could hardly be called a ravine; rather a shallow depression
+with banks not over a foot high, and with a varying width of from two to
+two hundred feet. The grass grew very patchy, and not very high; in
+fact, it seemed hardly tall enough to conceal anything as large as a
+lioness. We men walked along the edge of this depression, while the dogs
+ranged back and forth in its bottom.
+
+We had gone thus a quarter-mile when one of the rearguard came running
+up.
+
+"Bwana," said he, "we have seen the lioness. She is lying in a patch of
+grass. After you had passed, we saw her raise her head."
+
+It seemed impossible that she should have escaped both our eyes and the
+dogs' noses, but we returned. The man pointed out a thin growth of
+dried, yellow grass ten feet in diameter. Then it seemed even more
+incredible. Apparently we could look right through every foot of it. The
+man persisted, so we advanced in battle array. At thirty yards Captain
+D. saw the black tips of her ears. We all looked hard, and at last made
+her out, lying very flat, her head between her paws. Even then she was
+shadowy and unreal, and, as I have said, the cover did not look thick
+enough to conceal a good-sized dog.
+
+As though she realized she had been sighted, she at this moment leapt to
+her feet. Instantly I put a.405 bullet into her shoulder. Any other lion
+I ever saw or heard of would in such circumstances and at such a
+distance immediately have charged home. She turned tail and ran away. I
+missed her as she ran, then knocked her down with a third shot. She got
+up again, but was immediately hit by Captain D.'s.350 Magnum and brought
+to a halt. The dogs, seeing her turn tail and hearing our shots, had
+scrambled madly after her. We dared not shoot again for fear of hitting
+one of them, so we dashed rapidly into the grass and out the other side.
+Before we could get to her, she had sent Ruby flying through the air,
+and had then fallen over dead. Ruby got off lucky with only a deep gash
+the length of her leg.
+
+This was the only instance I experienced of a wounded lion showing the
+white feather. She was, however, only about three-quarters grown, and
+was suffering from diarrhoea.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+THE BIG LION.
+
+
+The boys skinned her while we ate lunch. Then we started several of them
+back towards camp with the trophy, and ourselves cut across country to a
+small river known as the Stony Athi. There we dismounted from our
+horses, and sent them and the boys atop the ridge above the stream,
+while we ourselves explored afoot the hillside along the river.
+
+This was a totally different sort of country from that to which we had
+been accustomed. Imagine a very bouldery hillside planted thickly with
+knee-high brambles and more sparsely with higher bushes. They were not
+really brambles, of course, but their tripping, tangling, spiky
+qualities were the same. We had to force our way through these, or step
+from boulder to boulder. Only very rarely did we get a little rubbly
+clear space to walk in, and then for only ten or twenty feet. We tried
+in spaced intervals to cover the whole hillside. It was very hard work.
+The boys, with the horses, kept pace with us on the sky-line atop, and
+two or three hundred yards away.
+
+We had proceeded in this fashion for about a mile, when suddenly, and
+most unexpectedly, the biggest lion I ever saw leapt straight up from a
+bush twenty-five yards in front of me, and with a tremendous roar
+vanished behind another bush. I had just time to throw up the.405
+shotgun-fashion and let drive a snapshot. Clifford Hill, who was ten
+yards to my right, saw the fur fly, and we all heard the snarl as the
+bullet hit. Naturally we expected an instant charge, but, as things
+turned out, it was evident the lion had not seen us at all. He had leapt
+at the sight of our men and horses on the sky-line, and when the bullet
+hit he must have ascribed it to them. At any rate, he began to circle
+through the tangled vines in their direction.
+
+From their elevation they could follow his movements. At once they set
+up howls of terror and appeals for help. Some began frantically to run
+back and forth. None of them tried to run away; there was nowhere to go!
+The only thing that saved them was the thick and spiky character of the
+cover. The lion, instead of charging straight and fast, was picking an
+easy way.
+
+We tore directly up hill as fast as we were able, leaping from rock to
+rock, and thrusting recklessly through the tangle. About half-way up I
+jumped to the top of a high, conical rock, and thence by good luck
+caught sight of the lion's great yellow head advancing steadily about
+eighty yards away. I took as good a sight as I could and pulled trigger.
+The recoil knocked me clear off the boulder, but as I fell I saw his
+tail go up and knew that I had hit. At once Clifford Hill and I jumped
+up on the rock again, but the lion had moved out of sight. By this time,
+however, the sound of the shots and the smell of blood had caused the
+dogs to close in. They did not, of course, attempt to attack the lion,
+nor even to get very near him, but their snarling and barking showed us
+the beast's whereabouts. Even this much is bad judgment on their part,
+as a number of them have been killed at it. The thicket burst into an
+unholy row.
+
+We all manoeuvred rapidly for position. Again luck was with me, for
+again I saw his great head, the mane standing out all around it; and
+for the second time I planted a heavy bullet square in his chest. This
+stopped his advance; he lay down. His head was up and his eyes glared,
+as he uttered the most reverberating and magnificent roars and growls.
+The dogs leapt and barked around him. We came quite close, and I planted
+my fourth bullet in his shoulder. Even this was not enough. It took a
+fifth in the same place to finish him, and he died at last biting great
+chunks of earth.
+
+The howls from the hill top ceased. All gathered to marvel at the lion's
+immense size. He measured three feet nine inches at the shoulder, and
+nine feet eleven inches between stakes, or ten feet eleven inches along
+contour. This is only five inches under record. We weighed him
+piecemeal, after a fashion, and put him between 550 and 600 pounds.
+
+But these are only statistics, and mean little unless a real attempt is
+made to visualize them. As a matter of fact, his mere height--that of a
+medium-size zebra-was little unless accented by the impression of his
+tremendous power and quickness.
+
+We skinned him, and then rode four long hours to camp. We arrived at
+dark, and at once set to work preparing the trophy. A dozen of us
+squatted around the skin, working by lantern light. Memba Sasa had had
+nothing to eat since before dawn, but in his pride and delight he
+refused to touch a mouthful until the job was finished. Several times we
+urged him to stop long enough for even a bite. He steadily declined, and
+whetted his knife, his eyes gleaming with delight, his lips crooning one
+of his weird Monumwezi songs. At eleven o'clock the task was done. Then
+I presented Memba Sasa with a tall mug of coffee and lots of sugar. He
+considered this a great honour.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV.
+
+THE FIFTEEN LIONS.
+
+
+Two days before Captain D. and I were to return to Juja we approached,
+about eleven o'clock in the morning, a long, low, rugged range of hills
+called Lucania. They were not very high, but bold with cliffs, buttes,
+and broken rocky stretches. Here we were to make our final hunt.
+
+We led our safari up to the level of a boulder flat between two deep
+cañons that ran down from the hills. Here should be water, so we
+gathered under a lone little tree, and set about directing the simple
+disposition of our camp. Herbert Spencer brought us a cold lunch, and we
+sat down to rest and refreshment before tackling the range.
+
+Hardly had we taken the first mouthfuls, however, when Memba Sasa,
+gasping for breath, came tearing up the slope from the cañon where he
+had descended for a drink. "Lions!" he cried, guardedly. "I went to
+drink, and I saw four lions. Two were lying under the shade, but two
+others were playing like puppies, one on its back."
+
+While he was speaking a lioness wandered out from the cañon and up the
+opposite slope. She was somewhere between six and nine hundred yards
+away, and looked very tiny; but the binoculars brought us up to her with
+a jump. Through them she proved to be a good one. She was not at all
+hurried, but paused from time to time to yawn and look about her. After
+a short interval, another, also a lioness, followed in her footsteps.
+She too had climbed clear when a third, probably a full-grown but still
+immature lion, came out, and after him the fourth.
+
+"You were right," we told Memba Sasa, "there are your four."
+
+But while we watched, a fifth, again at the spaced interval, this time a
+maned lion, clambered leisurely up in the wake of his family; and after
+him another, and another, and yet another! We gasped, and sat down, the
+better to steady our glasses with our knees. There seemed no end to
+lions. They came out of that apparently inexhaustible cañon bed one at a
+time and at the same regular intervals; perhaps twenty yards or so
+apart. It was almost as though they were being released singly. Finally
+we had _fifteen_ in sight.
+
+It was a most magnificent spectacle, and we could enjoy it unhurried by
+the feeling that we were losing opportunities. At that range it would be
+silly to open fire. If we had descended to the cañon in order to follow
+them out the other side, they would merely have trotted away. Our only
+chance was to wait until they had disappeared from sight, and then to
+attempt a wide circle in order to catch them from the flank. In the
+meantime we had merely to sit still.
+
+Therefore we stared through our glasses, and enjoyed to the full this
+most unusual sight. There were four cubs about as big as setter dogs,
+four full-grown but immature youngsters, four lionesses, and three male
+lions. They kept their spaced, single file formation for two-thirds the
+ascent of the hill--probably the nature of the ground forced them to
+it--and then gradually drew together. Near the top, but still below the
+summit, they entered a jumble of boulders and stopped. We could make out
+several of them lying down. One fine old yellow fellow stretched himself
+comfortably atop a flat rock, in the position of a bronze lion on a
+pedestal. We waited twenty minutes to make sure they were not going to
+move. Then, leaving all our men except the gunbearers under the tree, we
+slipped back until out of sight, and began to execute our flank
+movement. The chances seemed good. The jumble of boulders was surrounded
+by open country, and it was improbable the lions could leave it without
+being seen. We had arranged with our men a system of signals.
+
+For two hours we walked very hard in order to circle out of sight, down
+wind, and to gain the other side of the ridge back of the lions. We
+purposed slipping over the ridge and attacking from above. Even this was
+but a slight advantage. The job was a stiff one, for we might expect
+certainly the majority to charge.
+
+Therefore, when we finally deployed in skirmish order and bore down on
+that patch of brush and boulders, we were braced for the shock of
+battle. We found nothing. Our men, however, signalled that the lions had
+not left cover. After a little search, however, we discovered a very
+shallow depression running slantwise up the hill and back of the cover.
+So slight it was that even the glasses had failed to show it from below.
+The lions had in all probability known about us from the start, and
+were all the time engaged in withdrawing after their leisurely fashion.
+
+Of course we hunted for them; in fact, we spent two days at it; but we
+never found trace of them again. The country was too hard for tracking.
+They had left Lucania. Probably by the time we had completed our two
+hours of flanking movement they were five miles away. The presence of
+cubs would account for this. In ordinary circumstances we should have
+had a wonderful and exciting fight. But the sight of those fifteen great
+beasts was one I shall never forget.
+
+After we had hunted Lucania thoroughly we parted company with the Hills,
+and returned to Juja Farm.
+
+
+
+
+PART V.
+
+THE TSAVO RIVER.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XXV.
+
+VOI.
+
+
+Part way up the narrow-gauge railroad from the coast is a station called
+Voi. On his way to the interior the traveller stops there for an evening
+meal. It is served in a high, wide stone room by white-robed Swahilis
+under command of a very efficient and quiet East Indian. The voyager
+steps out into the darkness to look across the way upon the outlines of
+two great rounded hills against an amethyst sky. That is all he ever
+sees of Voi, for on the down trip he passes through it about two o'clock
+in the morning.
+
+At that particularly trying hour F. and I descended, and attempted, by
+the light of lanterns, to sort out twenty safari boys strange to us, and
+miscellaneous camp stores. We did not entirely succeed. Three men were
+carried on down the line, and the fly to our tent was never seen again.
+
+The train disappeared. Our boys, shivering, crept into corners. We took
+possession of the dak-bungalow maintained by the railroad for just such
+travellers as ourselves. It was simply a high stone room, with three
+iron beds, and a corner so cemented that one could pour pails of water
+over one's self without wetting the whole place. The beds were supplied
+with mosquito canopies and strong wire springs. Over these we spread our
+own bedding, and thankfully resumed our slumbers.
+
+The morning discovered to us Voi as the station, the district
+commissioner's house on a distant side hill, and a fairly extensive East
+Indian bazaar. The keepers of the latter traded with the natives.
+Immediately about the station grew some flat shady trees. All else was
+dense thorn scrub pressing close about the town. Opposite were the tall,
+rounded mountains.
+
+Nevertheless, in spite of its appearance, Voi has its importance in the
+scheme of things. From it, crossing the great Serengetti desert, runs
+the track to Kilimanjaro and that part of German East Africa. The
+Germans have as yet no railroad; so they must perforce patronize the
+British line thus far, and then trek across. As the Kilimanjaro
+district is one rich in natives and trade, the track is well used. Most
+of the transport is done by donkeys--either in carts or under the pack
+saddle. As the distance from water to water is very great, the journey
+is a hard one. This fact, and the incidental consideration that from fly
+and hardship the mortality in donkeys is very heavy, pushes the freight
+rates high. And that fact accounts for the motor car, which has been my
+point of aim from the beginning of this paragraph.
+
+The motor car plies between Voi and the German line at exorbitant rates.
+Our plan was to have it take us and some galvanized water tanks out into
+the middle of the desert and dump us down there. So after breakfast we
+hunted up the owner.
+
+He proved to be a very short, thick-set, blond German youth who
+justified Weber and Fields. In fact, he talked so exactly like those
+comedians that my task in visualizing him to you is somewhat lightened.
+If all, instead of merely a majority of my readers, had seen Weber and
+Fields that task would vanish.
+
+We explained our plan, and asked him his price.
+
+"Sefen hundert and feefty rupees,"[11] said he uncompromisingly.
+
+He was abrupt, blunt, and insulting. As we wanted transportation very
+much--though not seven hundred and fifty rupees' worth--we persisted. He
+offered an imperturbable take-it-or-leave-it stolidity. The motor truck
+stood near. I said something technical about the engine; then something
+more. He answered these remarks, though grudgingly. I suggested that it
+took a mighty good driver to motor through this rough country. He
+mentioned a particular hill. I proposed that we should try the station
+restaurant for beer while he told me about it. He grunted, but headed
+for the station.
+
+For two hours we listened to the most blatant boasting. He was a great
+driver; he had driven for M., the American millionaire; for the Chinese
+Ambassador to France; for Grand-Duke Alexis; for the Kaiser himself! We
+learned how he had been the trusted familiar of these celebrities, how
+on various occasions--all detailed at length--he had been treated by
+them as an equal; and he told us sundry sly, slanderous, and disgusting
+anecdotes of these worthies, his forefinger laid one side his nose.
+When we finally got him worked up to the point of going to get some
+excessively bad photographs, "I haf daken myself!" we began to have
+hopes. So we tentatively approached once more the subject of
+transportation.
+
+Then the basis of the trouble came out. One Davis, M.P. from England,
+had also dealt with our friend. Davis, as we reconstructed him, was of
+the blunt type, with probably very little feeling of democracy for those
+in subordinate positions, and with, most certainly, a good deal of
+insular and racial prejudice. Evidently a rather vague bargain had been
+struck, and the motor had set forth. Then ensued financial wranglings
+and disputes as to terms. It ended by useless hauteur on Davis's part,
+and inexcusable but effective action by the German. For Davis found
+himself dumped down on the Serengetti desert and left there.
+
+We heard all this in excruciatingly funny Weberandfieldese, many times
+repeated. The German literally beat his breast and cried aloud against
+Davis. We unblushingly sacrificed a probably perfectly worthy Davis to
+present need, and cried out against him too.
+
+"Am I like one dog?" demanded the German fervently.
+
+"Certainly not," we cried with equal fervour. We both like dogs.
+
+Then followed wearisomely reiterated assurances that we, at least, knew
+how a gentleman should be treated, and more boasting of proud
+connections in the past. But the end of it was a bargain of reasonable
+dimensions for ourselves, our personal boys, and our loads. Under plea
+of starting our safari boys off we left him, and crept, with shattered
+nerves, around the corner of the dak-bungalow. There we lurked, busy at
+pretended affairs, until our friend swaggered away to the Hindu
+quarters, where, it seems, he had his residence.
+
+About ten o'clock a small safari marched in afoot. It had travelled all
+of two nights across the Thirst, and was glad to get there. The single
+white man in charge had been three years alone among the natives near
+Kilimanjaro, and he was now out for a six months' vacation at home. Two
+natives in the uniform of Sudanese troops hovered near him very
+sorrowful. He splashed into the water of the dak-bungalow, and then
+introduced himself. We sat in teakwood easy-chairs and talked all day.
+He was a most interesting, likeable, and cordial man, at any stage of
+the game. The game, by means of French vermouth--of all
+drinks!--progressed steadily. We could hardly blame him for celebrating.
+By the afternoon he wanted to give things away. So insistent was he that
+F. finally accepted an ebony walking-stick, and I an ebony knife inset
+with ivory. If we had been the least bit unscrupulous, I am afraid the
+relatives at home would have missed their African souvenirs. He went out
+_viâ_ freight car, all by himself, seated regally in a steamer chair
+between two wide-open side doors, one native squatted on either side to
+see that he did not lurch out into the landscape.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[11] Fifty pounds.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI.
+
+THE FRINGE-EARED ORYX.
+
+
+At ten o'clock the following morning we started. On the high front seat,
+under an awning, sat the German, F., and I. The body of the truck was
+filled with safari loads, Memba Sasa, Simba Mohammed, and F.'s boy,
+whose name I have forgotten. The arrangement on the front seat was due
+to a strike on the part of F.
+
+"Look here," said he to me, "you've got to sit next that rotter. We want
+him to bring us back some water from the other side, and I'd break his
+neck in ten minutes. You sit next him and give him your motor car
+patter."
+
+Therefore I took the middle seat and played chorus. The road was not a
+bad one, as natural mountain roads go; I have myself driven worse in
+California. Our man, however, liked to exaggerate all the difficulties,
+and while doing it to point to himself with pride as a perfect wonder.
+Between times he talked elementary mechanics.
+
+"The inflammation of the sparkling plugs?" was one of his expressions
+that did much to compensate.
+
+The country mounted steadily through the densest thorn scrub I have ever
+seen. It was about fifteen feet high, and so thick that its penetration,
+save by made tracks, would have been an absolute impossibility. Our road
+ran like a lane between two spiky jungles. Bold bright mountains cropped
+up, singly and in short ranges, as far as the eye could see them.
+
+This sort of thing for twenty miles--more than a hard day's journey on
+safari. We made it in a little less than two hours; and the breeze of
+our going kept us reasonably cool under our awning. We began to
+appreciate the real value of our diplomacy.
+
+At noon we came upon a series of unexpectedly green and clear small
+hills just under the frown of a sheer rock cliff. This oasis in the
+thorn was occupied by a few scattered native huts and the usual squalid
+Indian dukka, or trading store. At this last our German friend stopped.
+From under the seat he drew out a collapsible table and a basket of
+provisions. These we were invited to share. Diplomacy's highest triumph!
+
+After lunch we surmounted our first steep grade to the top of a ridge.
+This we found to be the beginning of a long elevated plateau sweeping
+gently downward to a distant heat mist, which later experience proved a
+concealment to snowcapped Kilimanjaro. This plateau also looked to be
+covered with scrub. As we penetrated it, however, we found the bushes
+were more or less scattered, while in the wide, shallow dips between the
+undulations were open grassy meadows. There was no water. Isolated
+mountains or peaked hills showed here and there in the illimitable
+spaces, some of them fairly hull down, all of them toilsomely distant.
+This was the Serengetti itself.
+
+In this great extent of country somewhere were game herds. They were
+exceedingly migratory, and nobody knew very much about them. One of the
+species would be the rare and localized fringe-eared oryx. This beast
+was the principal zoological end of our expedition; though, of course,
+as always, we hoped for a chance lion. Geographically we wished to find
+the source of the Swanee River, and to follow that stream down to its
+joining with the Tsavo. About half-past one we passed our safari boys.
+We had intended to stop and replenish their canteens from our
+water-drums; but they told us they had encountered a stray and
+astonishing shower, and did not need more. We left them trudging
+cheerfully across the desert. They had travelled most of the night
+before, would do the same in the night to come, and should reach our
+camping-place about noon of the next day.
+
+We ourselves stopped about four o'clock. In a few hours we had come a
+hard three days' march. Over the side went our goods. We bade the German
+a very affectionate farewell; for he was still to fill our drums from
+one of the streams out of Kilimanjaro and deliver them to us on his
+return trip next day. We then all turned to and made camp. The scrub
+desert here was exactly like the scrub desert for the last sixty miles.
+
+The next morning we were up and off before sunrise. In this job time was
+a very large element of the contract. We must find our fringe-eared oryx
+before our water supply gave out. Therefore we had resolved not to lose
+a moment.
+
+The sunrise was most remarkable--lace work, flat clouds, with burnished
+copper-coloured clouds behind glowing through the lace. We admired it
+for some few moments. Then one of us happened to look higher. There,
+above the sky of the horizon, apparently suspended in mid-air half-way
+to the zenith, hung like delicate bubbles the double snow-cloud peaks of
+Kilimanjaro. Between them and the earth we could apparently see clear
+sky. It was in reality, of course, the blue-heat haze that rarely leaves
+these torrid plains. I have seen many mountains in all parts of the
+world, but none as fantastically insubstantial; as wonderfully lofty; as
+gracefully able to yield, before clouds and storms and sunrise glows,
+all the space in infinity they could possibly use, and yet to tower
+above them serene in an upper space of its own. Nearly every morning of
+our journey to come we enjoyed this wonderful vision for an hour or so.
+Then the mists closed in. The rest of the day showed us a grayish sky
+along the western horizon, with apparently nothing behind it.
+
+In the meantime we were tramping steadily ahead over the desert;
+threading the thorn scrub, crossing the wide shallow grass-grown swales;
+spying about us for signs of game. At the end of three or four miles we
+came across some ostrich and four hartebeeste. This encouraged us to
+think we might find other game soon, for the hartebeeste is a gregarious
+animal. Suddenly we saw a medium-sized squat beast that none of us
+recognized, trundling along like a badger sixty yards ahead. Any
+creature not easily identified is a scientific possibility in Africa.
+Therefore we fired at once. One of the bullets hit his foreleg paw.
+Immediately this astonishing small creature turned and charged us! If
+his size had equalled his ferocity, he would have been a formidable
+opponent. We had a lively few minutes. He rushed us again and again,
+uttering ferocious growls. We had to step high and lively to keep out of
+his way. Between charges he sat down and tore savagely at his wounded
+paw. We wanted him as nearly perfect a specimen as possible, so tried to
+rap him over the head with a club. Owing to remarkably long teeth and
+claws, this was soon proved impracticable; so we shot him. He weighed
+about fifty pounds, and we subsequently learned that he was a honey
+badger, an animal very rarely captured.
+
+We left the boys to take the whole skin and skull of this beast, and
+strolled forward slowly. The brush ended abruptly in a wide valley. It
+had been burnt over, and the new grass was coming up green. We gave one
+look, and sank back into cover.
+
+The sparse game of the immediate vicinity had gathered to this fresh
+feed. A herd of hartebeeste and gazelle were grazing, and five giraffe
+adorned the sky-line. But what interested us especially was a group of
+about fifty cob-built animals with the unmistakable rapier horns of the
+oryx. We recognized them as the rarity we desired.
+
+The conditions were most unfavourable. The cover nearest them gave a
+range of three hundred yards, and even this would bring them directly
+between us and the rising sun. There was no help for it, however. We
+made our way to the bushes nearest the herd, and I tried to align the
+blurs that represented my sights. At the shot, ineffective, they raced
+to the right across our front. We lay low. As they had seen nothing they
+wheeled and stopped after two hundred yards of flight. This shift had
+brought the light into better position. Once more I could define my
+sights. From the sitting position I took careful aim at the largest
+buck. He staggered twenty feet and fell dead. The distance was just 381
+paces. This shot was indeed fortunate, for we saw no more fringe-eared
+oryx.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII.
+
+ACROSS THE SERENGETTI.
+
+
+We arrived in camp about noon, almost exhausted with the fierce heat and
+a six hours' tramp, to find our German friend awaiting us. By an irony
+of fate the drums of water he had brought back with him were now
+unnecessary; we had our oryx. However, we wearily gave him lunch and
+listened to his prattle, and finally sped him on his way, hoping never
+to see him again.
+
+About three o'clock our men came in. We doled out water rations, and
+told them to rest in preparation for the morrow.
+
+Late that night we were awakened by a creaking and snorting and the
+flash of torches passing. We looked out, to see a donkey transport
+toiling slowly along, travelling thus at night to avoid the terrific day
+heats. The two-wheeled carts with their wild and savage drivers looked
+very picturesque in the flickering lights. We envied them vaguely their
+defined route that permitted night travel, and sank to sleep.
+
+In the morning, however, we found they had left with us new
+responsibilities in the shape of an elderly Somali, very sick, and down
+with the fever. This was indeed a responsibility. It was manifestly
+impossible for us to remain there with him; we should all die of thirst.
+It was equally impossible to take him with us, for he was quite unfit to
+travel under the sun. Finally, as the best solution of a bad business,
+we left him five gallons of water, some food, and some quinine, together
+with the advice to rest until night, and then to follow his companions
+along the beaten track. What between illness and wild beasts his chances
+did not look very good, but it was the best we could do for him. This
+incident exemplifies well the cruelty of this singular people. They
+probably abandoned the old man because his groans annoyed them, or
+because one of them wanted to ride in his place on the donkey cart.[12]
+
+We struck off as early as possible through the thorn scrub on a compass
+bearing that we hoped would bring us to a reported swamp at the head of
+the Swanee River. The Swanee River was one of the sources of the Tsavo.
+Of course this was guesswork. We did not know certainly the location of
+the swamp, its distance from us, nor what lay between us and it.
+However, we loaded all our transportable vessels with water, and set
+forth.
+
+The scrub was all alike; sometimes thinner, sometimes thicker. We
+marched by compass until we had raised a conical hill above the horizon,
+and then we bore just to the left of that. The surface of the ground was
+cut by thousands of game tracks. They were all very old, however, made
+after a rain; and it was evident the game herds venture into this
+country only when it contains rainwater. After two hours, however, we
+did see one solitary hartebeeste, whom we greeted as an old friend in
+desolation. Shortly afterwards we ran across one oribi, which I shot for
+our own table.
+
+At the end of two hours we sat down. The safari of twenty men was a very
+miscellaneous lot, consisting of the rag-tag-and-bobtail of the bazaars
+picked up in a hurry. They were soft and weak, and they straggled badly.
+The last weakling--prodded along by one of our two askaris--limped in
+only at the end of half an hour. Then we took a new start.
+
+The sun was by now up and hot. The work was difficult enough at best,
+but the weight of the tropics was now cast in the scale. Twice more
+within the next two hours we stopped to let every one catch up. Each
+time this required a longer interval. In the thorn it was absolutely
+essential to keep in touch with every member of the party. A man once
+lost would likely remain so, for we could not afford to endanger all for
+the sake of one.
+
+Time wore on until noon. Had it not been for a thin film of haze that
+now overspread the sky, I think the sun would have proved too much for
+some of the men. Four or five straggled so very badly that we finally
+left them in charge of one of our two askaris, with instructions to
+follow on as fast as they could. In order to make this possible, we were
+at pains to leave a well-marked trail.
+
+After this fashion, slowly, and with growing anxiety for some of the
+men, we drew up on our landmark hill. There our difficulties increased;
+the thorn brush thickened. Only by a series of short zigzags, and by
+taking advantage of every rhino trail going in our direction, could we
+make our way through it at all; while to men carrying burdens on their
+heads the tangle aloft must have been fairly maddening. So slow did our
+progress necessarily become, and so difficult was it to keep in touch
+with everybody, that F. and I finally halted for consultation. It was
+decided that I should push on ahead with Memba Sasa to make certain that
+we were not on the wrong line, while F. and the askaris struggled with
+the safari.
+
+Therefore I took my compass bearing afresh, and plunged into the scrub.
+The sensation was of hitting solid ground after a long walk through
+sand. We seemed fairly to shoot ahead and out of sight. Whenever we came
+upon earth we marked it deeply with our heels; we broke twigs downwards,
+and laid hastily-snatched bunches of grass to help the trail we were
+leaving for the others to follow. This, in spite of our compass, was a
+very devious track. Besides, the thorn bushes were patches of spiky aloe
+coming into red flower, and the spears of sisal.
+
+After an hour's steady, swift walking the general trend of the country
+began to slope downwards. This argued a watercourse between us and the
+hills around Kilimanjaro. There could be no doubt that we would cut it;
+the only question was whether it, like so many desert watercourses,
+might not prove empty. We pushed on the more rapidly. Then we caught a
+glimpse through a chance opening, of the tops of trees below us. After
+another hour we suddenly burst from the scrub to a strip of green grass
+beyond which were the great trees, the palms, and the festooned vines of
+a watercourse. Two bush bucks plunged into the thicket as we approached,
+and fifteen or twenty mongooses sat up as straight and stiff as so many
+picket pins the better to see us.
+
+For a moment my heart sank. The low undergrowth beneath the trees
+apparently swept unbroken from where we stood to the low bank opposite.
+It was exactly like the shallow, damp but waterless ravines at home,
+filled with black berry vines. We pushed forward, however, and found
+ourselves looking down on a smooth, swift flowing stream.
+
+It was not over six feet wide, grown close with vines and grasses, but
+so very deep and swift and quiet that an extraordinary volume of water
+passed, as through an artificial aqueduct. Furthermore, unlike most
+African streams, it was crystal clear. We plunged our faces and wrists
+in it, and took long, thankful draughts. It was all most grateful after
+the scorching desert. The fresh trees meeting in canopy overhead were
+full of monkeys and bright birds; festooned vines swung their great
+ropes here and there; long heavy grass carpeted underfoot.
+
+After we had rested a few minutes we filled our empty canteens, and
+prepared to start back for our companions. But while I stood there,
+Memba Sasa--good, faithful Memba Sasa--seized both canteens and darted
+away.
+
+"Lie down!" he shouted back at me, "I will go back."
+
+Without protest--which would have been futile anyway--I sank down on the
+grass. I was very tired. A little breeze followed the watercourse; the
+grass was soft; I would have given anything for a nap. But in wild
+Africa a nap is not healthy; so I drowsily watched the mongooses that
+had again come out of seclusion, and the monkeys, and the birds. At the
+end of a long time, and close to sundown, I heard voices. A moment later
+F., Memba Sasa, and about three-quarters of the men came in. We all,
+white and black, set to work to make camp. Then we built smudges and
+fired guns in the faint hope of guiding in the stragglers. As a matter
+of fact we had not the slightest faith in these expedients. Unless the
+men were hopelessly lost they should be able to follow our trail. They
+might be almost anywhere out in that awful scrub. The only course open
+to them would be to climb thorn trees for the night. Next day we would
+organize a formal search for them.
+
+In the meantime, almost dead from exhaustion, we sprawled about
+everywhere. The men, too dispirited even to start their own camp-fires,
+sat around resting as do boxers between rounds. Then to us came Memba
+Sasa, who had already that day made a double journey, and who should
+have been the most tired of all.
+
+"Bwana," said he, "if you will lend me Winchi,[13] and a lantern, I will
+bring in the men."
+
+We lent him his requirements, and he departed. Hours later he returned,
+carefully leaned "Winchi" in the corner of the tent, deposited the
+lantern, and stood erect at attention.
+
+"Well, Memba Sasa," I inquired.
+
+"The men are here."
+
+"They were far?"
+
+"Very far."
+
+"Verna, Memba Sasa, assanti sana."[14]
+
+That was his sole--and sufficient--reward.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[12] I have just heard that this old man survived, and has been singing
+our praises in Nairobi as the saviour of his life.
+
+[13] His name for the.405 Winchester.
+
+[14] "Very good, Memba Sasa, thanks very much."
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII.
+
+DOWN THE RIVER.
+
+
+Relieved now of all anxiety as to water, we had merely to make our way
+downstream. First, however, there remained the interesting task of
+determining its source.
+
+Accordingly next day we and our gunbearers left the boys to a
+well-earned rest, and set out upstream. At first we followed the edge of
+the river jungle, tramping over hard hot earth, winding in and out of
+growths of thorn scrub and brilliant aloes. We saw a herd of impallas
+gliding like phantoms; and as we stood in need of meat, I shot at one of
+them but missed. The air was very hot and moist. At five o'clock in the
+morning the thermometer had stood at 78 degrees; and by noon it had
+mounted to 106 degrees. In addition the atmosphere was filled with the
+humidity that later in the day was to break in extraordinary deluges.
+We moved slowly, but even then our garments were literally dripping wet.
+
+At the end of three miles the stream bed widened. We came upon
+beautiful, spacious, open lawns of from eighty to one hundred acres
+apiece, separated from each other by narrow strips of tall forest trees.
+The grass was high, and waved in the breeze like planted grain; the
+boundary trees resembled artificial wind-breaks of eucalyptus or
+Normandy poplar. One might expect a white ranch house beyond some low
+clump of trees, and chicken runs, and corrals.
+
+Along these apparent boundaries of forest trees our stream divided, and
+divided again, so that we were actually looking upon what we had come to
+seek--the source of the Swanee branch of the Tsavo River. In these
+peaceful, protected meadows was it cradled. From them it sprang full
+size out into the African wilderness.
+
+A fine impalla buck grazed in one of these fields. I crept as near him
+as I could behind one of the wind-break rows of trees. It was not very
+near, and for the second time I missed. Thereupon we decided two things:
+that we were not really meat hungry, and that yesterday's hard work was
+not conducive to to-day's good shooting.
+
+Having thus accomplished the second object of our expedition, we
+returned to camp. From that time begins a regular sequence of events on
+which I look back with the keenest of pleasure. The two constant factors
+were the river and the great dry country on either side. Day after day
+we followed down the one, and we made brief excursions out into the
+other. Each night we camped near the sound of the swift running water,
+where the winds rustled in the palms, the acacias made lacework across
+the skies, and the jungle crouched in velvet blackness close to earth
+like a beast.
+
+Our life in its routine was regular; in its details bizarre and full of
+the unexpected. Every morning we arose an hour before day, and ate by
+lantern light and the gleam of fires. At the first gray we were afoot
+and on the march. F. and I, with our gunbearers, then pushed ahead down
+the river, leaving the men to come along as fast or as slowly as they
+pleased. After about six hours or so of marching, we picked out a good
+camp site, and lay down to await the safari. By two o'clock in the
+afternoon camp was made. Also it was very hot. After a light lunch we
+stripped to the skin, lay on our cots underneath the mosquito canopies,
+and tried to doze or read. The heat at this time of day was blighting.
+About four o'clock, if we happened to be inspired by energy, one or the
+other of us strolled out at right angles to the stream to see what we
+could see. The evening was tepid and beautiful. Bathed and pyjama-clad
+we lolled in our canvas chairs, smoking, chatting or listening to the
+innumerable voices of the night.
+
+Such was the simple and almost invariable routine of our days. But
+enriching it, varying it, disguising it even--as rain-squalls, sunshine
+cloud shadow, and unexpected winds modify the landscape so well known
+from a study window--were the incredible incidents and petty adventures
+of African travel.
+
+The topography of the river itself might be divided very roughly into
+three: the headwater country down to its junction with the Tsavo the
+palm-elephant-grass stretch, and the gorge and hill district just before
+it crosses the rail road.
+
+The headwater country is most beautiful The stream is not over ten feet
+wide, but very deep, swift, and clear. It flows between defined banks
+and is set in a narrow strip of jungle. In places the bed widens out to
+a carpet of the greenest green grass sown with flowers; at other places
+it offers either mysterious thickets, spacious cathedrals, or snug
+bowers. Immediately beyond the edge of this river jungle begins the
+thorn scrub, more or less dense. Distant single mountains or buttes
+serve as landmarks in a brush-grown, gently rising, strongly rolling
+country. Occasional alluvial flats draw back to low cliffs not over
+twenty feet high.
+
+After the junction of the Tsavo, palms of various sorts replace to a
+large extent the forest trees. Naturally also the stream widens and
+flows more slowly. Outside the palms grow tall elephant-grass and bush.
+Our marching had generally to be done in the narrow, neutral space
+between these two growths. It was pleasant enough, with the river
+snatching at the trailing branches, and the birds and animals rustling
+away. Beyond the elephant-grass flats low ridges ran down to the river,
+varying in width, but carrying always with them the dense thorn. Between
+them ran recesses, sometimes three or four hundred acres in extent, high
+with elephant-grass or little trees like alders. So much for the
+immediate prospect on our right as we marched. Across the river to our
+left were huge riven mountains, with great cliffs and cañons. As we
+followed necessarily every twist and turn of the river, sometimes these
+mountains were directly ahead of us, then magically behind, so that we
+thought we had passed them by. But the next hour threw them again across
+our trail. The ideal path would, of course, have cut across all the
+bends and ridges; but the thorn of the ridges and the elephant-grass of
+the flats forbade it. So we marched ten miles to gain four.
+
+After days of struggle and deception we passed those mountains. Then we
+entered a new type of country where the Tsavo ran in cañons between
+hills. The high cliffs often towered far above us; we had to pick our
+way along narrow river ledges; again the river ran like a trout stream
+over riffles and rapids, while we sauntered along cleared banks beneath
+the trees. Had we not been making a forced march under terrific heat at
+just that time, this last phase of the river might have been the
+pleasantest of all.
+
+Throughout the whole course of our journey the rhinoceros was the most
+abundant of the larger animals. The indications of old tracks proved
+that at some time of the year, or under some different conditions, great
+herds of the more gregarious plains antelope and zebra visited the
+river, but at the time of our visit they were absent. The rhinoceroses,
+however, in incredible numbers came regularly to water. Paradoxically,
+we saw very few of them, and enjoyed comparative immunity from their
+charges. This was due to the fact that their habits and ours swung in
+different orbits. The rhinoceros, after drinking, took to the hot, dry
+thorn scrub in the low hills; and as he drank at night, we rarely
+encountered him in the river bottoms where we were marching. This was
+very lucky, for the cover was so dense that a meeting must necessarily
+be at close quarters. Indeed these large and truculent beasts were
+rather a help than a hindrance, for we often made use of their wide,
+clear paths to penetrate some particularly distressing jungle. However,
+we had several small adventures with them: just enough to keep us alert
+in rounding corners or approaching bushes--and nine-tenths of our travel
+was bushes and corners. The big, flat footsteps, absolutely fresh in the
+dust, padded methodically ahead of us down the only way until it seemed
+that we could not fail to plump upon their maker around the next bend.
+We crept forward foot by foot, every sense alert, finger on trigger.
+Then after a time the spoor turned off to the right, towards the hills.
+We straightened our backs and breathed a sigh of relief. This happened
+over and over again. At certain times of year also elephants frequent
+the banks of the Tsavo in considerable numbers We saw many old signs,
+and once came upon the fresh path of a small herd. The great beasts had
+passed by that very morning. We gazed with considerable awe on limbs
+snatched bodily from trees; on flat-topped acacias a foot in diameter
+pulled up by the roots and stood up side down; on tree trunks twisted
+like ropes.
+
+Of the game by far the most abundant were the beautiful red impalla. We
+caught glimpses of their graceful bodies gliding in and out of sight
+through the bushes; or came upon them standing in small openings, their
+delicate ears pointed to us. They and the tiny dikdik furnished our
+table; and an occasional water-buck satisfied the men. One day we came
+on one of the latter beasts sound asleep in a tiny open space. He was
+lying down, and his nose rested against the earth just like a very old
+family horse in a paddock.
+
+Besides these common species were bush-buck wart-hog, lesser kudu,
+giraffe, and leopard. The bush-buck we jumped occasionally quite near at
+hand. They ducked their heads low and rushed tearingly to the next
+cover. The leopard was heard sighing every night, and saw their pad
+marks next day; but only twice did we catch glimpses of them. One
+morning we came upon the fresh-killed carcass of a female lesser kudu
+from which, evidently, we had driven the slayer.
+
+These few species practically completed the game list. They were
+sufficient for our needs; and the lesser kudu was a prize much desired
+for our collection. But by far the most interesting to me were the
+smaller animals, the birds, and the strange, innumerable insects.
+
+We saw no natives in the whole course of our journey.
+
+The valley of the river harboured many monkeys. They seemed to be of two
+species, blue and brown, but were equally noisy and amusing. They
+retired ahead of our advance with many remarks, or slipped past us to
+the rear without any comments whatever. When we made camp they retired
+with indignant protests, and when we had quite settled down they
+returned as near as they dared.
+
+One very hot afternoon I lay on my canvas cot in the open, staring
+straight upward into the overarching greenery of the trees. This is a
+very pleasant thing to do. The beautiful up-spreading, outstretching of
+the tree branches and twigs intrigue the eye; the leaves make
+fascinating, hypnotically waving patterns against a very blue sky; and
+in the chambers and galleries of the upper world the birds and insects
+carry on varied businesses of their own. After a time the corner of my
+eye caught a quick movement far to the left and in a shadow. At once I
+turned my attention that way. After minute scrutiny I at length made out
+a monkey. Evidently considering himself quite unobserved, he was slowly
+and with great care stalking our camp. Inch by inch he moved, taking
+skilful advantage of every bit of cover, flattening himself along the
+limbs, hunching himself up behind bunches of leaves, until he had gained
+a big limb directly overhead. There he stretched flat, staring down at
+the scene that had so strongly aroused his curiosity. I lay there for
+over two hours reading and dozing. My friend aloft never stirred. When
+dusk fell he was still there. Some time after dark he must have regained
+his band, for in the morning the limb was vacant.
+
+Now comes the part of this story that really needs a witness, not to
+veracity perhaps, but to accuracy of observations. Fortunately I have F.
+About noon next day the monkey returned to his point of observation. He
+used the same precautions as to concealment; he followed his route of
+the day before; he proceeded directly to his old conning tower on the
+big limb. It did not take him quite so long to get there, for he had
+already scouted out the trail. _And close at his heels followed two
+other monkeys_! They crawled where he crawled; they crouched where he
+crouched; they hid where he hid; they flattened themselves out by him on
+the big limb, and all three of them passed the afternoon gazing down on
+the strange and fascinating things below. Whether these newcomers were
+part of the first one's family out for a treat, or whether they were
+Cook's Tourists of the Jungle in charge of my friend's competence as a
+guide, I do not know.
+
+Farther down the river F. and I stopped for some time to watch the
+crossing of forty-odd of the little blue monkeys. The whole band
+clambered to near the top of a tall tree growing by the water's edge.
+There, one by one, they ran out on a straight overhanging limb and cast
+themselves into space. On the opposite bank of the river, and leaning
+well out, grew a small springy bush. Each monkey landed smash in the
+middle of this, clasped it with all four hands, swayed alarmingly,
+recovered, and scampered ashore. It was rather a nice problem in
+ballistics this, for a mistake in calculation of a foot in distance or
+a pound in push would land Mr. Monkey in the water. And the joke of it
+was that directly beneath that bush lay two hungry-looking crocodiles!
+As each tiny body hurtled through the air I'll swear a look of hope came
+into the eyes of those crocs. We watched until the last had made his
+leap. There were no mistakes. The joke was against the crocodiles.
+
+We encountered quite a number of dog-faced baboons. These big apes
+always retreated very slowly and noisily. Scouts in the rearguard were
+continually ascending small trees or bushes for a better look at us,
+then leaping down to make disparaging remarks. One lot seemed to show
+such variation in colour from the usual that we shot one. The distance
+was about two hundred and fifty yards. Immediately the whole band--a
+hundred or so strong--dropped on all fours and started in our direction.
+This was rather terrifying. However, as we stood firm, they slowly came
+to a halt at about seventy yards, barked and chattered for a moment,
+then hopped away to right and left.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX.
+
+THE LESSER KUDU.
+
+
+About eight o'clock, the evening of our first day on the Swanee, the
+heat broke in a tropical downpour. We heard it coming from a long
+distance, like the roar of a great wind. The velvet blackness, star
+hung, was troubled by an invisible blurring mist, evidenced only through
+a subtle effect on the subconsciousness. Every leaf above us, in the
+circle of our firelight, depended absolutely motionless from its stem.
+The insects had ceased their shrilling; the night birds their chirping;
+the animals, great and small, their callings or their stealthy rustling
+to and fro. Of the world of sound there remained only the crackling of
+our fires, the tiny singing of the blood in our ears, and that far-off
+portentous roar. Our simple dispositions were made. Trenches had been
+dug around the tents; the pegs had been driven well home; our stores had
+been put in shelter. We waited silently, puffing away our pipes.
+
+The roaring increased in volume. Beneath it we began to hear the long,
+rolling crash of thunder. Overhead the stars, already dimmed, were
+suddenly blotted from existence. Then came the rain, in a literal
+deluge, as though the god of floods had turned over an entire reservoir
+with one twist of his mighty hand. Our fire went out instantly; the
+whole world went out with it. We lay on our canvas cots unable to see a
+foot beyond our tent opening; unable to hear anything but the insistent,
+terrible drumming over our heads; unable to think of anything through
+the tumult of waters. As a man's body might struggle from behind a
+waterfall through the torrents, so our imaginations, half drowned,
+managed dimly to picture forth little bits--the men huddled close in
+their tiny tents, their cowled blankets over their heads. All the rest
+of the universe had gone.
+
+After a time the insistent beat and rush of waters began to wear through
+our patience. We willed that this wracking tumult should cease; we
+willed it with all the force that was in us. Then, as this proved vain,
+we too humped our spiritual backs, cowled our souls with patience, and
+waited dumbly for the force of the storm to spend itself. Our faculties
+were quite as effectually drowned out by the unceasing roar and crash of
+the waters as our bodily comfort would have been had we lacked the
+protection of our tent.
+
+Abruptly the storm passed. It did not die away slowly in the diminuendo
+of ordinary storms. It ceased as though the reservoir had been tipped
+back again. The rapid _drip_, _drip_, _drip_ of waters now made the
+whole of sound; all the rest of the world lay breathless. Then, inside
+our tent, a cricket struck up bravely.
+
+This homely, cheerful little sound roused us. We went forth to count
+damages and to put our house in order. The men hunted out dry wood and
+made another fire; the creatures of the jungle and the stars above them
+ventured forth.
+
+Next morning we marched into a world swept clean. The ground was as
+smooth as though a new broom had gone over it. Every track now was
+fresh, and meant an animal near at hand. The bushes and grasses were
+hung with jewels. Merry little showers shook down from trees sharing a
+joke with some tiny wind. White steam rose from a moist, fertile-looking
+soil. The smell of greenhouses was in the air. Looking back, we were
+stricken motionless by the sight of Kilimanjaro, its twin peaks
+suspended a clean blue sky, fresh snow mantling its shoulders.
+
+This day, so cheeringly opened, was destined to fulfil its promise. In
+the dense scrub dwell a shy and rare animal called the lesser kudu
+specimens of which we greatly desired. The beast keeps to the thickest
+and driest cove where it is impossible to see fifty yards ahead but
+where the slightest movement breaks the numberless dry interlacements of
+which the place seems made. To move really quietly one could not cover
+over a half-mile in an hour. As the countryside extends a thousand
+square miles or more, and the lesser kudu is rare, it can be seen that
+hunting them might have to be a slow and painful process. We had twice
+seen the peculiar tracks.
+
+On this morning, however, we caught a glimpse of the beast itself. A
+flash of gray, with an impression of the characteristic harness-like
+stripes--that was all. The trail, in the ground, was of course very
+plain. I left the others and followed it into the brush. As usual the
+thorn scrub was so thick that I had to stoop and twist to get through it
+at all, and so brittle that the least false move made a crackling like a
+fire. The rain of the night before had, however, softened the _débris_
+lying on the ground. I moved forward as quickly as I could, half
+suffocated in the steaming heat of the dense thicket. After three or
+four hundred yards the beast fell into a walk, so I immediately halted.
+I reasoned that after a few steps at this gait he would look back to see
+whether or not he was followed. If his scouting showed him nothing he
+might throw off suspicion. After ten minutes I crept forward again. The
+spoor showed my surmises to be correct, for I came to where the animal
+had turned, behind a small bush, and had stood for a few minutes. Taking
+up the tracks from this point, I was delighted to find that the kudu had
+forgotten its fear, and was browsing. At the end of five minutes more of
+very careful work, I was fortunate enough to see it, feeding from the
+top of a small bush thirty-five yards away. The raking shot from the
+Springfield dropped it in its tracks.
+
+It proved to be a doe, a great prize of course, but not to be compared
+with the male. We skinned her carefully, and moved on, delighted to have
+the species.
+
+Our luck was not over, however. At the end of six hours we picked our
+camp in a pretty grove by the swift-running stream. There we sat down
+to await the safari. The tree-tops were full of both the brown and blue
+monkeys, baboons barked at us from a distance, the air was musical with
+many sweet birds. Big thunder-clouds were gathering around the horizon.
+
+The safari came in. Mohammed immediately sought us out to report, in
+great excitement, that he had seen five kudu across the stream. He
+claimed to have watched them even after the safari had passed, and that
+they had not been alarmed. The chance was slight that the kudu could be
+found, but still it was a chance. Accordingly we rather reluctantly gave
+up our plans for a loaf and a nap. Mohammed said the place was an hour
+back; we had had six hours march already. However, about two o'clock we
+set out. Before we had arrived quite at the spot we caught a glimpse of
+the five kudu as they dashed across a tiny opening ahead of us. They had
+moved downstream and crossed the river.
+
+It seemed rather hopeless to follow them into that thick country once
+they had been alarmed, but the prize was great. Therefore Memba Sasa and
+I took up the trail. We crept forward a mile, very quiet, very
+tense--very sweaty. Then simultaneously, through a chance opening and a
+long distance away, we caught a patch of gray with a single transverse
+white stripe. There was no chance to ascertain the sex of the beast, nor
+what part of its anatomy was thus exposed. I took a bull's eye chance on
+that patch of gray; had the luck to hit it in the middle. The animal
+went down. Memba Sasa leapt forward like a madman; I could not begin to
+keep pace with him. When I had struggled through the thorn, I found him
+dancing with delight.
+
+"Monuome, bwana! buck, master!" he cried as soon as he saw me, and made
+a spiral gesture in imitation of the male's beautiful corkscrew horns.
+
+While the men prepared the trophy, F. and I followed on after the other
+four to see what they would do, and speedily came to the conclusion that
+we were lucky to land two of the wily beasts. The four ran compactly
+together and in a wide curve for several hundred yards. Then two faced
+directly back, while the other two, one on either side, made a short
+detour out and back to guard the flanks.
+
+We did not get back to camp until after dark. A tremendous pair of
+electric storms were volleying and roaring at each other across the
+space of night; leopards were crying; a pack of wild dogs were barking
+vociferously. The camp, as we approached it, was a globe of light in a
+bower of darkness. The fire, shining and flickering on the under sides
+of the leaves, lent them a strangely unreal stage-like appearance; the
+porters, their half-naked bodies and red blankets catching the blaze,
+roasted huge chunks of meat over little fires.
+
+We ate a belated supper in comfort, peace, and satisfaction. Then the
+storms joined forces and fell upon us.
+
+
+
+
+XXX.
+
+ADVENTURES BY THE WAY.
+
+
+We journeyed slowly on down the stream. Interesting things happened to
+us. The impressions of that journey are of two sorts: the little
+isolated details and the general background of our day's routine, with
+the gray dawn, the great heats of the day, the blessed evening and its
+fireflies; the thundering of heaven's artillery, and the downpour of
+torrents; the hot, high, crackling thorn scrub into which we made
+excursions; the swift-flowing river with its palms and jungles;
+outleaning palms trailing their fronds just within the snatch of the
+flood waters; wide flats in the embrace of the river bends, or extending
+into the low hills, grown thick with lush green and threaded with
+rhinoceros paths; the huge sheer cliff mountains over the way; distant
+single hills far down. The mild discomfort of the start before daylight
+clearly revealed the thorns and stumbling blocks; the buoyant
+cheerfulness of the first part of the day, with the grouse rocketing
+straight up out of the elephant grass, the birds singing everywhere, and
+the beasts of the jungle still a-graze at the edges; the growing weight
+of the sun, as though a great pressing hand were laid upon the
+shoulders; the suffocating, gasping heat of afternoon, and the;
+gathering piling black and white clouds; the cool evening in pyjamas
+with the fireflies flickering; among the bushes, the river singing, and
+little; breezes wandering like pattering raindrops in the dry palm
+leaves--all these, by repetition of main elements, blend in my memory to
+form a single image. To be sure each day the rock pinnacles over the way
+changed slightly their compass bearings, and little variations of
+contour lent variety to the procession of days. But in essentials they
+were of one kin.
+
+But here and there certain individual scenes and incidents stand out
+clearly and alone. Without reference to my notebook I could not tell you
+their chronological order, nor the days of their happening. They
+occurred, without correlation.
+
+Thus one afternoon at the loafing hour, when F. was sound asleep under
+his mosquito bar, and I in my canvas chair was trying to catch the
+breeze from an approaching deluge, to me came a total stranger in a
+large turban. He was without arms or baggage of any sort, an alien in a
+strange and savage country.
+
+"Jambo, bwana m'kubwa (greeting, great master)!" said he.
+
+"Jambo," said I, as though his existence were not in the least
+surprising, and went on reading. This showed him that I was indeed a
+great master.
+
+After a suitable interval I looked up.
+
+"Wataka neenee (what do you want)?" I demanded.
+
+"Nataka sema qua heri (I want to say good-bye)," said this astonishing
+individual.
+
+I had, until that moment, been quite unaware of his existence. As he had
+therefore not yet said "How do you do," I failed to fathom his reasons
+for wanting to say "good-bye." However, far be it from me to deny any
+one innocent pleasure, so I gravely bade him good-bye, and he
+disappeared into the howling wilderness whence he had come.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One afternoon we came upon two lemurs seated gravely side by side on a
+horizontal limb ten feet up a thorn tree. They contemplated us with the
+preternatural gravity of very young children, and without the slightest
+sign of fear. We coveted them as pets for Billy, but soon discovered
+that their apparent tameness was grounded on good, solid common sense.
+The thorns of that thorn tree! We left them sitting upright, side by
+side.
+
+A little farther on, and up a dry earthy hillside, a medium-sized beast
+leapt from an eroded place fairly under my feet and made off with a
+singularly familiar kiyi. It was a strange-looking animal, apparently
+brick red in colour. When I had collected myself I saw it was a wild
+dog. It had been asleep in a warm hollow of red clay, and had not
+awakened until I was fairly upon it. We had heard these beasts nearly
+every night, but this was the first we had seen. Some days later we came
+upon the entire pack drinking at the river. They leapt suddenly across
+our front eighty yards away, their heads all turned towards us
+truculently, barking at us like so many watch dogs. They made off, but
+not as though particularly alarmed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One afternoon I had wounded a good wart-hog across the river, and had
+gone downstream to find a dry way over. F., more enthusiastic, had
+plunged in and promptly attacked the wart-hog. He was armed with the
+English service revolver shooting the.455 Ely cartridge. It is a very
+short, stubby bit of ammunition. I had often cast doubt on its driving
+power as compared to the.45 Colt, for example. F., as a loyal
+Englishman, had, of course, defended his army's weapon. When I reached
+the centre of disturbance I found that F. had emptied his revolver three
+times--eighteen shots--into the head and forequarters of that wart-hog
+without much effect. Incidentally the wart-hog had given him a good
+lively time, charging again and again. The weapon has not nearly the
+shock power of even our.38 service--a cartridge classified as too light
+for serious business.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One afternoon I gave my shotgun to one of the porters to carry afield,
+remarking facetiously to all and sundry that he looked like a gunbearer.
+After twenty minutes we ran across a rhinoceros. I spent some time
+trying to manoeuvre into position for a photograph of the beast.
+However, the attempt failed. We managed to dodge his rush. Then, after
+the excitement had died, we discovered the porter and the shotgun up a
+tree. He descended rather shamefaced. Nobody said anything about it. A
+half-hour later we came upon another rhinoceros. The beast was visible
+at some distance, and downhill. Nevertheless the porter moved a little
+nearer a tree. This was too much for Memba Sasa. All the rest of the
+afternoon he "ragged" that porter in much the same terms we would have
+employed in the same circumstances.
+
+"That place ahead," said he, "looks like a good place for rhinoceros.
+Perhaps you'd better climb a tree."
+
+"There is a dikdik; a bush is big enough to climb for him."
+
+"Are you afraid of jackals, too?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The fireflies were our regular evening companions. We caught one or two
+of them for the pleasure of watching them alternately igniting and
+extinguishing their little lamps. Even when we put them in a bottle they
+still kept up their performance bravely.
+
+But besides them we had an immense variety of evening visitors. Beetles
+of the most inconceivable shapes and colours, all sorts of moths, and
+numberless strange things--leaf insects, walking-stick insects (exactly
+like dry twigs), and the fierce, tall, praying mantis with their mock
+air of meekness and devotion. Let one of the other insects stray within
+reach and their piety was quickly enough abandoned! One beetle about
+three-eighths of an inch across was oblong in shape and of pure
+glittering gold. His wing covers, on the other hand, were round and
+transparent. The effect was of a jewel under a tiny glass case. Other
+beetles were of red dotted with black, or of black dotted with red; they
+sported stripes, or circles of plain colours; they wore long, slender
+antennae, or short knobby horns; they carried rapiers or pinchers, long
+legs or short. In fact they ran the gamut of grace and horror, so that
+an inebriate would find here a great rest for the imagination.
+
+After we had gone to bed we noticed more pleasantly our cricket. He
+piped up, you may remember, the night of the first great storm. That
+evening he took up his abode in some fold or seam of our tent, and there
+stayed throughout all the rest of the journey. Every evening he tuned up
+cheerfully, and we dropped to sleep to the sound of his homelike piping.
+We grew very fond of him, as one does of everything in this wild and
+changing country that can represent a stable point of habitude.
+
+Nor must I forget one evening when all of a sudden out of the darkness
+came a tremendous hollow booming, like the beating of war drums or the
+bellowing of some strange great beast. At length we identified the
+performer as an unfamiliar kind of frog!
+
+
+
+
+XXXI.
+
+THE LOST SAFARI.
+
+
+We were possessed of a map of sorts, consisting mostly of wide blank
+spaces, with an occasional tentative mountain, or the probable course of
+streams marked thereon. The only landmark that interested us was a
+single round peak situated south of our river and at a point just before
+we should cross the railroad at Tsavo Station. There came a day when,
+from the top of a hill where we had climbed for the sake of the outlook,
+we thought we recognized that peak. It was about five miles away as the
+crow flies.
+
+Then we returned to camp and made the fatal mistake of starting to
+figure. We ought to cover the distance, even with the inevitable twists
+and turns, in a day; the tri-weekly train passed through Tsavo the
+following night; if we could catch that we would save a two days' wait
+for the next train. You follow the thought. We arose very early the
+next morning to get a good start on our forced march.
+
+There is no use in spinning out a sad tale. We passed what we thought
+must be our landmark hill just eleven times. The map showed only one
+butte; as a matter of fact there were dozens. At each disappointment we
+had to reconstruct our theories. It is the nature of man to do this
+hopefully--Tsavo Station must be just around the _next_ bend. We marched
+six hours without pause; then began to save ourselves a little. By all
+the gods of logical reasoning we _proved_ Tsavo just beyond a certain
+fringe of woods. When we arrived we found that there the river broke
+through a range of hills by way of a deep gorge. It was a change from
+the everlasting scrub, with its tumbling waters, its awful cliffs, its
+luxuriant tropical growths; but it was so much the more difficult to
+make our way through. Beyond the gorge we found any amount of hills,
+kopjes, buttes, sugar loaves, etc., each isolated from its fellows, each
+perfectly competent to serve as the map's single landmark.
+
+We should have camped, but we were very anxious to catch that train; and
+we were convinced that now, after all that work, Tsavo could not be far
+away. It would be ridiculous and mortifying to find we had camped
+almost within sight of our destination!
+
+The heat was very bad and the force of the sun terrific. It seemed to
+possess actual physical weight, and to press us down from above. We
+filled our canteens many times at the swift-running stream, and emptied
+them as often. By two o'clock F. was getting a little wobbly from the
+sun. We talked of stopping, when an unexpected thunder shower rolled out
+from behind the mountains, and speedily overcast the entire heavens.
+This shadow relieved the stress. F., much revived, insisted that we
+proceed. So we marched and passed many more hills.
+
+In the meantime it began to rain, after the whole-hearted tropical
+fashion. In two minutes we were drenched to the skin. I kept my matches
+and notebook dry by placing them in the crown of my cork helmet. After
+the intense heat this tepid downpour seemed to us delicious.
+
+And then, quite unexpectedly, of course, we came around a bend to make
+out through the sheets of rain the steel girders of the famous Tsavo
+bridge.[15]
+
+We clambered up a steep, slippery bank to the right-of-way, along which
+we proceeded half a mile to the station. This consisted of two or three
+native huts, a house for the East Indian in charge, and the station
+building itself. The latter was a small frame structure with a narrow
+floorless veranda. There was no platform. Drawing close on all sides was
+the interminable thorn scrub. Later, when the veil of rain had been
+drawn aside, we found that Tsavo, perched on a hillside, looked abroad
+over a wide prospect. For the moment all we saw was a dark, dismal,
+dripping station, wherein was no sign of life.
+
+We were beginning to get chilly, and we wanted very much some tea, fire,
+a chance to dry, pending the arrival of our safari. We jerked open the
+door and peered into the inky interior.
+
+"Babu!" yelled F., "Babu!"
+
+From an inner back room came the faint answer in most precise English,--
+
+"I can-not come; I am pray-ing."
+
+There followed the sharp, quick tinkle of a little bell--the Indian
+manner of calling upon the Lord's attention.
+
+We both knew better than to hustle the institutions of the East; so we
+waited with what patience we had, listening to the intermittent
+tinkling of the little bell. At the end of fully fifteen minutes the
+devotee appeared. He proved to be a mild, deprecating little man, very
+eager to help, but without resources. He was a Hindu, and lived mainly
+on tea and rice. The rice was all out, but he expected more on the night
+train. There was no trading store here. He was the only inhabitant.
+After a few more answers he disappeared, to return carrying two pieces
+of letter paper on which were tea and a little coarse native sugar.
+These, with a half-dozen very small potatoes, were all he had to offer.
+
+It did not look very encouraging. We had absolutely nothing in which to
+boil water. Of course we could not borrow of our host; caste stood in
+the way there. If we were even to touch one of his utensils, that
+utensil was for him defiled for ever. Nevertheless, as we had eaten
+nothing since four o'clock that morning, and had put a hard day's work
+behind us, we made an effort. After a short search we captured a savage
+possessed of a surfuria, or native cooking pot. Memba Sasa scrubbed this
+with sand. First we made tea in it, and drank turn about, from its wide
+edge. This warmed us up somewhat. Then we dumped in our few potatoes and
+a single guinea fowl that F. had decapitated earlier in the day. We
+ate; and passed the pot over to Memba Sasa.
+
+So far, so good; but we were still very wet, and the uncomfortable
+thought would obtrude itself that the safari might not get in that day.
+It behoved us at least to dry what we had on. I hunted up Memba Sasa,
+whom I found in a native hut. A fire blazed in the middle of the floor.
+I stooped low to enter, and squatted on my heels with the natives.
+Slowly I steamed off the surface moisture. We had rather a good time
+chatting and laughing. After a while I looked out. It had stopped
+raining. Therefore I emerged and set some of the men collecting
+firewood. Shortly I had a fine little blaze going under the veranda roof
+of the station. F. and I hung out our breeches to dry, and spread the
+tails of our shirts over the heat. F. was actually the human chimney,
+for the smoke was pouring in clouds from the breast and collar of his
+shirt. We were fine figures for the public platform of a railway
+station!
+
+We had just about dried off and had reassumed our thin and scanty
+garments, when the babu emerged. We stared in drop-jawed astonishment.
+He had muffled his head and mouth in a most brilliant scarf, as if for
+zero weather; although dressed otherwise in the usual pongee. Under one
+arm he carried a folded clumsy cotton umbrella; around his waist he had
+belted a huge knife; in his other hand he carried his battle-axe. I mean
+just that--his battle-axe. We had seen such things on tapestries or in
+museums, but did not dream that they still existed out of captivity.
+This was an Oriental looking battle-axe with a handle three feet long, a
+spike on top, a spike out behind, and a half-moon blade in front. The
+babu had with a little of his signal paint done the whole thing, blade
+and all, to a brilliant window-shutter green.
+
+As soon as we had recovered our breath, we asked him very politely the
+reason for these stupendous preparations. It seemed that it was his
+habit to take a daily stroll just before sunset, "for the sake of the
+health," as he told us in his accurate English.
+
+"The bush is full of bad men," he explained, "who would like to kill me;
+but when they see this axe and this knife they say to each other, 'There
+walks a very bad man. We dare not kill him.'"
+
+He marched very solemnly a quarter-mile up the track and back, always in
+plain view. Promptly on his return he dived into his little back room
+where the periodic tinkling of his praying bell for some time marked his
+gratitude for having escaped the "bad men."
+
+The bell ceased. Several times he came to the door, eyed us timidly, and
+bolted back into the darkness. Finally he approached to within ten feet,
+twisted his hands and giggled in a most deprecating fashion.
+
+"What is the use of this killing game?" he gabbled as rapidly as he
+could. "Man should not destroy what man cannot first create." After
+which he giggled again and fled.
+
+His conscience, evidently, had driven him to this defiance of our high
+mightinesses against his sense of politeness and his fears.
+
+About this time my boy Mohammed and the cook drifted in. They reported
+that they had left the safari not far back. Our hopes of supper and
+blankets rose. They declined, however, with the gathering darkness, and
+were replaced by wrath against the faithless ones. Memba Sasa, in spite
+of his long day, took a gun and disappeared in the darkness. He did not
+get back until nine o'clock, when he suddenly appeared in the doorway to
+lean the gun in the corner, and to announce, "Hapana safari."
+
+We stretched ourselves on a bench and a table--the floor was
+impossible--and took what sleep we could. In the small hours the train
+thundered through, the train we had hoped to catch!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[15] This is the point at which construction was stopped by man-eating
+lions. See Patterson's "The Man-eaters of Tsavo."
+
+
+
+
+XXXII.
+
+THE BABU.
+
+
+We stretched ourselves stiffly in the first gray of dawn, wondering
+where we could get a mouthful of breakfast. On emerging from the station
+a strange and gladsome sight met our eyes--namely, chop boxes and gun
+cases belonging to some sportsman not yet arrived. Necessity knows no
+law; so we promptly helped ourselves to food and gun-cleaning
+implements. Much refreshed, we lit our pipes and settled ourselves to
+wait for our delinquents.
+
+Shortly after sunrise an Indian track inspector trundled in on a handcar
+propelled by two natives. He was a suave and corpulent person with a
+very large umbrella and beautiful silken garments. The natives upset the
+handcar off the track, and the newcomer settled himself for an enjoyable
+morning. He and the babu discussed ethics and metaphysical philosophy
+for three solid hours. Evidently they came from different parts of
+India, and their only common language was English. Through the thin
+partition in the station building we could hear plainly every word. It
+was very interesting. Especially did we chortle with delight when the
+inspector began one of his arguments somewhat as follows:--
+
+"Now the two English who are here. They possess great sums of
+wealth"--F. nudged me delightedly--"and they have weapons to kill, and
+much with which to do things, yet their savage minds--"
+
+It was plain, rank, eavesdropping, but most illuminating, thus to get at
+first hand the Eastern point of view as to ourselves; to hear the
+bloodless, gentle shell of Indian philosophy described by believers.
+They discussed the most minute and impractical points, and involved
+themselves in the most uncompromising dilemmas.
+
+Thus the gist of one argument was as follows: "All sexual intercourse is
+sin, but the race must go forward by means of sexual intercourse;
+therefore the race is conceived in sin and is sinful; but it is a great
+sin for me, as an individual, not to carry forward the race, since the
+Divine Will decrees that in some way the race is necessary to it.
+_Therefore_ it would seem that man is in sin whichever way you look at
+it--"
+
+"But," interposes the inspector firmly but politely, "is it not possible
+that sexual sin and the sin of opposing Divine Will may be of balance in
+the spirit, so that in resisting one sort a man acquires virtue to
+commit the other without harm--" And so on for hours.
+
+At twelve-thirty the safari drifted in. Consider that fact and what it
+meant. The plain duty of the headman was, of course, to have seen that
+the men followed us in the day before. But allowing, for the sake of
+argument, that this was impossible, and that the men had been forced by
+the exhaustion of some of their number to stop and camp, if they had
+arisen betimes they should have completed the journey in two hours at
+most. That should have brought them in by half-past seven or eight
+o'clock. But a noon arrival condemned them without the necessity of
+argument. They had camped early, had risen very, very late, and had
+dawdled on the road.
+
+We ourselves gave the two responsible headmen twenty lashes apiece; then
+turned over to them the job of thrashing the rest. Ten per man was the
+allotment. They expected the punishment; took it gracefully. Some even
+thanked us when it was over! The babu disappeared in his station.
+
+About an hour later he approached us, very deprecating, and handed us a
+telegram. It was from the district commissioner at Voi ordering us to
+report for flogging "porters on the Tsavo Station platform."
+
+"I am truly sorry, I am truly sorry," the babu was murmuring at our
+elbows.
+
+"What does this mean?" we demanded of him.
+
+He produced a thick book.
+
+"It is in here--the law," he explained. "You must not flog men on the
+station platform. It was my duty to report."
+
+"How did we know that? Why didn't you tell us?"
+
+"If you had gone there"--he pointed ten feet away to a spot exactly like
+all other spots--"it would have been off the platform. Then I had
+nothing to say."
+
+We tried to become angry.
+
+"But why in blazes couldn't you have told us of that quietly and
+decently? We'd have moved."
+
+"It is the law" He tapped his thick book.
+
+"But we cannot be supposed to know by heart every law in that book. Why
+didn't you warn us before reporting?" we insisted.
+
+"I am truly sorry," he repeated. "I hope and trust it will not prove
+serious. But it is in the book."
+
+We continued in the same purposeless fashion for a moment or so longer.
+Then the babu ended the discussion thus,--
+
+"It was my duty. I am truly sorry. Suppose I had not reported and should
+die to-day, and should go to heaven, and God should ask me, 'Have you
+done your duty to-day?' what should I say to Him?"
+
+We gave it up; we were up against Revealed Religion.
+
+So that night we took a freight train southward to Voi, leaving the babu
+and his prayer-bell, and his green battle-axe and his conscience alone
+in the wilderness. We had quite a respect for that babu.
+
+The district commissioner listened appreciatively to our tale.
+
+"Of course I shall not carry the matter further," he told us, "but
+having known the babu, you must see that once he had reported to me I
+was compelled to order you down here. I am sorry for the inconvenience."
+
+And when we reflected on the cataclysmic upheaval that babu would have
+undergone had we not been summoned after breaking one of The Laws in the
+Book, we had to admit the district commissioner was right.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PART VI.
+
+IN MASAILAND.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII.
+
+OVER THE LIKIPIA ESCARPMENT.
+
+
+Owing to an outbreak of bubonic plague, and consequent quarantine, we
+had recruited our men outside Nairobi, and had sent them, in charge of
+C., to a little station up the line.
+
+Billy and I saw to the loading of our equipment on the train, and at two
+o'clock, in solitary state, set forth. Our only attendants were Mohammed
+and Memba Sasa, who had been fumigated and inoculated and generally
+Red-Crossed for the purpose.
+
+The little narrow-gauge train doubled and twisted in its climb up the
+range overlooking Nairobi and the Athi Plains. Fields of corn grew so
+tall as partially to conceal villages of round, grass-thatched huts with
+conical roofs; we looked down into deep ravines where grew the
+broad-leaved bananas; the steep hillsides had all been carefully
+cultivated. Savages leaning on spears watched us puff heavily by.
+Women, richly ornamented with copper wire or beads, toiled along bent
+under loads carried by means of a band across the top of the head.[16]
+Naked children rushed out to wave at us. We were steaming quite
+comfortably through Africa as it had been for thousands of years before
+the white man came.
+
+At Kikuyu Station we came to a halt. Kikuyu Station ordinarily embarks
+about two passengers a month, I suppose. Now it was utterly swamped with
+business, for on it had descended all our safari of thirty-nine men and
+three mules. Thirty of the thirty-nine yelled and shrieked and got in
+the wrong place, as usual. C. and the train men and the stationmaster
+and our responsible boys heaved and tugged and directed, ordered,
+commanded. At length the human element was loaded to its places and
+locked in. Then the mules had to be urged up a very narrow gang-lank
+into a dangerous-looking car. Quite sensibly they declined to take
+chances. We persuaded them. The process was quite simple. Two of the men
+holding the ends at a safe distance stretched a light strong cord across
+the beasts' hind legs, and sawed it back and forth.
+
+We clanged the doors shut, climbed aboard, and the train at last
+steamed on. Now bits of forest came across our way, deep, shaded, with
+trailing curtain vines, and wide leaves as big as table tops, and high,
+lush, impenetrable undergrowth full of flashing birds, fathomless
+shadows, and inquisitive monkeys. Occasionally we emerged to the edge of
+a long oval meadow, set in depressions among hills, like our Sierra
+meadows. Indeed so like were these openings to those in our own wooded
+mountains that we always experienced a distinct shock of surprise as the
+familiar woods parted to disclose a dark solemn savage with flashing
+spear.
+
+We stopped at various stations, and descended and walked about in the
+gathering shadows of the forest. It was getting cool. Many little things
+attracted our attention, to remain in our memories as isolated pictures.
+Thus I remember one grave savage squatted by the track playing on a sort
+of mandoline-shaped instrument. It had two strings, and he twanged these
+alternately, without the slightest effort to change their pitch by
+stopping with his fingers. He bent his head sidewise, and listened with
+the meticulous attention of a connoisseur. We stopped at that place for
+fully ten minutes, but not for a second did he leave off twanging his
+two strings, nor did he even momentarily relax his attention.
+
+It was now near sundown. We had been climbing steadily. The train
+shrieked twice, and unexpectedly slid out to the edge of the Likipia
+Escarpment. We looked down once more into the great Rift Valley.
+
+The Rift Valley is as though a strip of Africa--extending half the
+length of the continent--had in time past sunk bodily some thousands of
+feet, leaving a more or less sheer escarpment on either side, and
+preserving intact its own variegated landscape in the bottom. We were on
+the Likipia Escarpment. We looked across to the Mau Escarpment, where
+the country over which our train had been travelling continued after its
+interruption by the valley. And below us were mountains, streams,
+plains. The westering sun threw strong slants of light down and across.
+
+The engine shut off its power, and we slid silently down the rather
+complicated grades and curves of the descent. A noble forest threw its
+shadows over us. Through the chance openings we caught glimpses of the
+pale country far below. Across high trestle bridges we rattled, and
+craned over to see the rushing white water of the mountain torrents a
+hundred feet down. The shriek of our engine echoed and re-echoed
+weirdly from the serried trunks of trees and from the great cliffs that
+seemed to lift themselves as we descended.
+
+We debarked at Kijabe[17] well after dark. It is situated on a ledge in
+the escarpment, is perhaps a quarter-mile wide, and includes nothing
+more elaborate than the station, a row of Indian dukkas, and two houses
+of South Africans set back towards the rise in the cliffs. A mile or so
+away, and on a little higher level, stand the extensive buildings of an
+American mission. It is, I believe, educational as well as sectarian, is
+situated in one of the most healthful climates of East Africa, and is
+prosperous.
+
+At the moment we saw none of these things. We were too busy getting men,
+mules, and equipment out of the train. Our lanterns flared in the great
+wind that swept down the defile; and across the track little fires
+flared too. Shortly we made the acquaintance of the South Africander who
+furnished us our ox teams and wagon; and of a lank, drawling youth who
+was to be our "rider." The latter was very anxious to get started, so we
+piled all our stores and equipment but those immediately necessary for
+the night aboard the great wagon. Then we returned to the dak-bungalow
+for a very belated supper. While eating this we discussed our plans.
+
+These were in essence very simple. Somewhere south of the Great Thirst
+of the Sotik a river called the Narossara. Back of the river were high
+mountains, and down the river were benches dropping off by thousands of
+feet to the barren country of Lake Magahdi. Over some of this country
+ranged the Greater Kudu, easily the prize buck of East Africa. We
+intended to try for a Greater Kudu.
+
+People laughed at us. The beast is extremely rare; it ranges over a wide
+area; it inhabits the thickest sort of cover in a sheer mountainous
+country; its senses are wonderfully acute; and it is very wary. A man
+_might_, once in a blue moon, get one by happening upon it accidentally,
+but deliberately to go after it was sheer lunacy. So we were told. As a
+matter of fact, we thought so ourselves, but Greater Kudu was as good an
+excuse as another.
+
+The most immediate of our physical difficulties was the Thirst. Six
+miles from Kijabe we would leave the Kedong River. After that was no
+more water for two days and nights. During that time we should be forced
+to travel and rest in alternation day and night, with a great deal of
+travel and very little rest. We should be able to carry for the men a
+limited amount of water on the ox wagon, but the cattle could not drink.
+It was a hard, anxious grind. A day's journey beyond the first water
+after the Thirst we should cross the Southern Guaso Nyero River.[18]
+Then two days should land us at the Narossara. There we must leave our
+ox wagon and push on with our tiny safari. We planned to relay back for
+porters from our different camps.
+
+That was our whole plan. Our transport rider's object in starting this
+night was to reach the Kedong River, and there to outspan until our
+arrival next day. The cattle would thus get a good feed and rest. Then
+at four in the afternoon we would set out to conquer the Thirst. After
+that it would be a question of travelling to suit the oxen.
+
+Next morning, when we arose, we found one of the wagon Kikuyus awaiting
+us. His tale ran that after going four miles, the oxen had been
+stampeded by lions. In the mix-up the dusselboom had been broken. He
+demanded a new dusselboom. I looked as wise as though I knew just what
+that meant; and told him largely, to help himself. Shortly he departed
+carrying what looked to be the greater part of a forest tree.
+
+We were in no hurry, so we did not try to get our safari under way
+before eight o'clock. It consisted of twenty-nine porters, the
+gunbearers, three personal boys, three syces, and the cook. Of this lot
+some few stand out from the rest, and deserve particular attention.
+
+Of course I had my veterans, Memba Sasa and Mohammed. There was also
+Kongoni, gunbearer, elsewhere described. The third gunbearer was
+Marrouki, a Wakamba. He was the personal gunbearer of a Mr. Twigg, who
+very courteously loaned him for this trip as possessing some knowledge
+of the country. He was a small person, with stripes about his eyes;
+dressed in a Scotch highland cap, khaki breeches, and a shooting coat
+miles too big for him. His soul was earnest, his courage great, his
+training good, his intelligence none too brilliant. Timothy, our cook,
+was pure Swahili. He was a thin, elderly individual, with a wrinkled
+brow of care. This represented a conscientious soul. He tried hard to
+please, but he never could quite forget that he had cooked for the
+Governor's safari. His air was always one of silent disapproval of our
+modest outfit. So well did he do, however, often under trying
+circumstances, that at the close of the expedition Billy presented him
+with a very fancy knife. To her vast astonishment he burst into violent
+sobs.
+
+"Why, what is it?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, memsahib," he wailed, "I wanted a watch!"
+
+As personal boy Billy had a Masai named Geyeye.[19] The members of this
+proud and aristocratic tribe rarely condescend to work for the white
+man; but when they do, they are very fine servants, for they are highly
+intelligent. Geyeye was short and very, very ugly. Perhaps this may
+partly explain his leaving tribal life, for the Masai generally are over
+six feet.
+
+C.'s man was an educated Coast Swahili named Abba Ali. This individual
+was very smart. He wore a neatly-trimmed Vandyke beard, a flannel
+boating hat, smart tailored khakis, and carried a rattan cane. He was
+alert, quick, and intelligent. His position was midway between that of
+personal boy and headman.
+
+Of the rank and file we began with twenty-nine. Two changed their minds
+before we were fairly started, and departed in the night. There was no
+time to get regular porters; but fortunately a Kikuyu chief detailed two
+wild savages from his tribe to act as carriers. These two children of
+nature drifted in with pleasant smiles and little else save
+knick-knacks. From our supplies we gave them two thin jerseys, reaching
+nearly to the knees. Next day they appeared with broad tucks sewed
+around the middle! They looked like "My Mama didn't use wool soap." We
+then gave it up, and left them free and untrammelled.
+
+They differed radically. One was past the first enthusiasms and vanities
+of youth. He was small, unobtrusive, unornamented. He had no possessions
+save the jersey, the water-bottle, and the blanket we ourselves
+supplied. The blanket he crossed bandolier fashion on one shoulder. It
+hung down behind like a tasselled sash. His face was little and wizened
+and old. He was quiet and uncomplaining, and the "easy mark" for all the
+rest. We had constantly to be interfering to save him from imposition as
+to too heavy loads, too many jobs, and the like. Nearing the close of
+the long expedition, when our loads were lighter and fewer, one day C.
+spoke up.
+
+"I'm going to give the old man a good time," said he. "I doubt if he's
+ever had one before, or if he ever will again. He's that sort of a meek
+damnfool."
+
+So it was decreed that Kimau[20] should carry nothing for the rest of
+the trip, was to do no more work, was to have all he wanted to eat. It
+was a treat to see him. He accepted these things without surprise,
+without spoken thanks; just as he would have accepted an increased
+supply of work and kicks. Before his little fire he squatted all day,
+gazing vacantly off into space, or gnawing on a piece of the meat he
+always kept roasting on sticks. He spoke to no one; he never smiled or
+displayed any obvious signs of enjoyment; but from him radiated a
+feeling of deep content.
+
+His companion savage was a young blood, and still affected by the
+vanities of life. His hair he wore in short tight curls, resembling the
+rope hair of a French poodle, liberally anointed with castor-oil and
+coloured with red-paint clay. His body, too, was turned to bronze by the
+same method, so that he looked like a beautiful smooth metal statue come
+to life. To set this quality off he wore glittering collars, bracelets,
+and ear ornaments of polished copper and brass. When he joined us his
+sole costume was a negligent two-foot strip of cotton cloth. After he
+had received his official jersey, he carefully tied the cloth over his
+wonderful head; nor as far as we knew did he again remove it until the
+end of the expedition. All his movements were inexpressibly graceful.
+They reminded one somehow of Flaxman's drawings of the Greek gods. His
+face, too, was good-natured and likeable. A certain half feminine, wild
+grace, combined with the queer effect of his headgear, caused us to name
+him Daphne. At home he was called Kingangui. At first he carried his
+burden after the fashion of savages--on the back; and kept to the rear
+of the procession; and at evening consorted only with old Lightfoot. As
+soon as opportunity offered, he built himself a marvellous iridescent
+ball of marabout feathers. Each of these he split along the quill, so
+that they curled and writhed in the wind. This picturesque charm he
+suspended from a short pole in front of his tent. Also, he belonged to
+the Kikuyu tribe; he ate no game meat, but confined his diet to cornmeal
+porridge. We were much interested in watching Daphne's gradual
+conversion from savage ways to those of the regular porter. Within two
+weeks he was carrying his load on his head or shoulder, and trying to
+keep up near the head of the safari. The charm of feathers disappeared
+shortly after, I am sorry to say. He took his share of the meat. Within
+two months Daphne was imitating as closely as possible the manners and
+customs of his safari mates. But he never really succeeded in looking
+anything but the wild and graceful savage he was.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[16] After the fashion of the Canadian tump line.
+
+[17] Pronounce all the syllables.
+
+[18] An entirely different stream from that flowing north of Mt. Kenia.
+
+[19] Pronounce _every_ syllable.
+
+[20] His official name was Lightfoot, Queen of the Fairies, because of
+his ballet-like costume.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV.
+
+TO THE KEDONG.
+
+
+For four hours we descended the valley through high thorn scrub or the
+occasional grassy openings. We were now in the floor of the Rift Valley,
+and both along the escarpments and in the floor of the great blue valley
+itself mountains were all about us. Most of the large ones were
+evidently craters; and everywhere were smaller kopjes or buttes, that in
+their day had also served as blow holes for subterranean fires.
+
+At the end of this time we arrived at the place where we were supposed
+to find the wagon. No wagon was there.
+
+The spot was in the middle of a level plain on which grew very scattered
+bushes, a great deal like the sparser mesquite growths of Arizona.
+Towards the Likipia Escarpment, and about half-way to its base, a line
+of trees marked the course of the Kedong River. Beyond that, fairly
+against the mountain, we made out a settler's house.
+
+Leaving Billy and the safari, C. and I set out for this house. The
+distance was long, and we had not made half of it before thunder clouds
+began to gather. They came up thick and black behind the escarpment, and
+rapidly spread over the entire heavens. We found the wagon shortly,
+still mending its dusselboom, or whatever the thing was. Leaving
+instructions for it to proceed to a certain point on the Kedong River,
+we started back for our safari.
+
+It rained. In ten minutes the dusty plains, as far as the eye could
+reach, were covered with water two or three inches deep, from which the
+sparse bunches of grasses grew like reeds in a great marshy lake. We
+splashed along with the water over our ankles. The channels made by the
+game trails offered natural conduits, and wherever there was the least
+grade they had become rushing brooks. We found the safari very
+bedraggled. Billy had made a mound of valuables, atop which she perched,
+her waterproof cape spread as wide as possible, a good deal like a
+brooding hen. We set out for the meeting-point on the Kedong. In half an
+hour we had there found a bit of higher ground and had made camp.
+
+As suddenly as they had gathered the storm clouds broke away. The
+expiring sun sent across the valley a flood of golden light, that gilded
+the rugged old mountain of Suswa over the way.
+
+"Directly on the other side of Suswa," C. told me, "there is a 'pan' of
+hard clay. This rain will fill it, and we shall find water there. We can
+take a night's rest, and set off comfortably in the morning."
+
+So the rain that had soaked us so thoroughly was a blessing after all.
+While we were cooking supper the wagon passed us, its wheels and frame
+creaking, its great whip cracking like a rifle, its men shrieking at the
+imperturbable team of eighteen oxen. It would travel until the oxen
+wanted to graze, or sleep, or scratch an ear, or meditate on why is a
+Kikuyu. Thereupon they would be outspanned and allowed to do it,
+whatever it was, until they were ready to go on again. Then they would
+go on. These sequences might take place at any time of the day or night,
+and for greater or lesser intervals of time. That was distinctly up to
+the oxen; the human beings had mighty little to say in the matter. But
+transport riding, from the point of view of the rank outsider, really
+deserves a chapter of its own.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV.
+
+THE TRANSPORT RIDER.
+
+
+The wagon is one evolved in South Africa--a long, heavily-constructed
+affair, with ingenious braces and timbers so arranged as to furnish the
+maximum clearance with the greatest facility for substitution in case
+the necessity for repairs might arise. The whole vehicle can be
+dismounted and reassembled in a few hours; so that unfordable streams or
+impossible bits of country can be crossed piecemeal. Its enormous wheels
+are set wide apart. The brake is worked by a crank at the rear, like a
+reversal of the starting mechanism of a motor car. Bolted to the frame
+on either side between the front and rear wheels are capacious
+cupboards, and two stout water kegs swing to and fro when the craft is
+under way. The net carrying capacity of such a wagon is from three to
+four thousand pounds.
+
+This formidable vehicle, in our own case, was drawn by a team of
+eighteen oxen. The biggest brutes, the wheelers, were attached to a
+tongue, all the others pulled on a long chain. The only harness was the
+pronged yoke that fitted just forward of the hump. Over rough country
+the wheelers were banged and jerked about savagely by the tongue; they
+did not seem to mind it but exhibited a certain amount of intelligence
+in manipulation.
+
+To drive these oxen we had one white man named Brown, and two small
+Kikuyu savages. One of these worked the brake crank in the rear while
+the other preceded the lead cattle. Brown exercised general supervision,
+a long-lashed whip and Boer-Dutch expletives and admonitions.
+
+In transport riding, as this game is called, there is required a great
+amount of especial skill though not necessarily a high degree of
+intelligence. Along the flats all goes well enough, but once in the
+unbelievable rough country of a hill trek the situation alters. A man
+must know cattle and their symptoms. It is no light feat to wake up
+eighteen sluggish bovine minds to the necessity for effort, and then to
+throw so much dynamic energy into the situation that the whole eighteen
+will begin to pull at once. That is the secret, unanimity; an ox is the
+most easily discouraged working animal on earth. If the first three
+couples begin to haul before the others have aroused to their effort,
+they will not succeed in budging the wagon an inch, but after a moment's
+struggle will give up completely. By that time the leaders respond to
+the command and throw themselves forward in the yoke. In vain. They
+cannot pull the wagon and their wheel comrades too. Therefore they give
+up. By this time, perhaps, the lash has aroused the first lot to another
+effort. And so they go, pulling and hauling against each other, getting
+nowhere, until the end is an exhausted team, a driver half insane, and a
+great necessity for unloading.
+
+A good driver, on the other hand, shrieks a few premonitory Dutch
+words--and then! I suppose inside those bovine heads the effect is
+somewhat that of a violent electric explosion. At any rate it hits them
+all at once, and all together, in response, they surge against their
+yokes. The heavily laden wagon creaks, groans, moves forward. The
+hurricane of Dutch and the volleys of whip crackings rise to a
+crescendo. We are off!
+
+To perform just this little simple trick of getting the thing started
+requires not only a peculiar skill or gift, but also lungs of brass and
+a throat of iron. A transport rider without a voice is as a tenor in the
+same fix. He may--and does--get so hoarse that it is a pain to hear him;
+but as long as he can croak in good volume he is all right. Mere
+shouting will not do. He must shriek, until to the sympathetic bystander
+it seems that his throat must split wide open. Furthermore, he must
+shriek the proper things. It all sounds alike to every one but transport
+riders and oxen; but as a matter of fact it is Boer-Dutch, nicely
+assorted to suit different occasions. It is incredible that oxen should
+distinguish; but, then, it is also incredible that trout should
+distinguish the nice differences in artificial flies.
+
+After the start has been made successfully, the craft must be kept under
+way. To an unbiassed bystander the whole affair looks insane. The wagon
+creaks and sways and groans and cries aloud as it bumps over great
+boulders in the way; the leading Kikuyu dances nimbly and shrills
+remarks at the nearest cattle; the tail Kikuyu winds energetically back
+and forth on his little handle, and tries to keep his feet. And Brown!
+he is magnificent! His long lash sends out a volley of rifle reports,
+down, up, ahead, back; his cracked voice roars out an unending stream
+of apparent gibberish. Back and forth along the line of the team he
+skips nimbly, the sweat streaming from his face. And the oxen plod
+along, unhasting, unexcited, their eyes dreamy, chewing the cud of
+yesterday's philosophic reflections. The situation conveys the general
+impression of a peevish little stream breaking against great calm
+cliffs. All this frantic excitement and expenditure of energy is so
+apparently purposeless and futile, the calm cattle seem so aloof and
+superior to it all, so absolutely unaffected by it. They are going
+slowly, to be sure; their gait may be maddeningly deliberate, but
+evidently they do not intend to be hurried. Why not let them take their
+own speed?
+
+But all this hullabaloo means something after all. It does its business,
+and the top of the boulder-strewn hill is gained. Without it the whole
+concern would have stopped, and then the wagon would have to be unloaded
+before a fresh start could have been made. Results with cattle are not
+shown by facial expression nor by increased speed, but simply by
+continuance. They will plod up steep hills or along the level at the
+same placid gait. Only in the former case they require especial
+treatment.
+
+In case the wagon gets stuck on a hill, as will occasionally happen, so
+that all the oxen are discouraged at once, we would see one of the
+Kikuyus leading the team back and forth, back and forth, on the side
+hill just ahead of the wagon. This is to confuse their minds, cause them
+to forget their failure, and thus to make another attempt.
+
+At one stretch we had three days of real mountains. N'gombe[21] Brown
+shrieked like a steam calliope all the way through. He lasted the
+distance, but had little camp-fire conversation even with his beloved
+Kikuyus.
+
+When the team is outspanned, which in the waterless country of forced
+marches is likely to be almost any time of the day or night, N'gombe
+Brown sought a little rest. For this purpose he had a sort of bunk that
+let down underneath the wagon. If it were daytime, the cattle were
+allowed to graze under supervision of one of the Kikuyus. If it was
+night time they were tethered to the long chain, where they lay in a
+somnolent double row. A lantern at the head of the file and one at the
+wagon's tail were supposed to discourage lions. In a bad lion country
+fires were added to these defences.
+
+N'gombe Brown thus worked hard through varied and long hours in strict
+intimacy with stupid and exasperating beasts. After working hours he
+liked to wander out to watch those same beasts grazing! His mind was as
+full of cattle as that! Although we offered him reading matter, he never
+seemed to care for it, nor for long-continued conversation with white
+people not of his trade. In fact the only gleam of interest I could get
+out of him was by commenting on the qualities or peculiarities of the
+oxen. He had a small mouth-organ on which he occasionally performed, and
+would hold forth for hours with his childlike Kikuyus. In the
+intelligence to follow ordinary directions he was an infant. We had to
+iterate and reiterate in words of one syllable our directions as to
+routes and meeting-points, and then he was quite as apt to go wrong as
+right. Yet, I must repeat, he knew thoroughly all the ins and outs of a
+very difficult trade, and understood, as well, how to keep his cattle
+always fit and in good condition. In fact he was a little hipped on what
+the "dear n'gombes" should or should not be called upon to do.
+
+One incident will illustrate all this better than I could explain it.
+When we reached the Narossara River we left the wagon and pushed on
+afoot. We were to be gone an indefinite time, and we left N'gombe Brown
+and his outfit very well fixed. Along the Narossara ran a pleasant shady
+strip of high jungle; the country about was clear and open; but most
+important of all, a white man of education and personal charm occupied a
+trading boma, or enclosure, near at hand. An accident changed our plans
+and brought us back unexpectedly at the end of a few weeks. We found
+that N'gombe Brown had trekked back a long day's journey, and was
+encamped alone at the end of a spur of mountains. We sent native runners
+after him. He explained his change of base by saying that the cattle
+feed was a little better at his new camp! Mind you this: at the
+Narossara the feed was quite good enough, the oxen were doing no work,
+there was companionship, books, papers, and even a phonograph to while
+away the long weeks until our return. N'gombe Brown quite cheerfully
+deserted all this to live in solitude where he imagined the feed to be
+microscopically better!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[21] N'gombe = oxen.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI.
+
+ACROSS THE THIRST.
+
+
+We were off, a bright, clear day after the rains. Suswa hung grayish
+pink against the bluest of skies. Our way slanted across the Rift Valley
+to her base, turned the corner, and continued on the other side of the
+great peak until we had reached the rainwater "pan" on her farther side.
+It was a long march.
+
+The plains were very wide and roomy. Here and there on them rose many
+small cones and craters, lava flows and other varied evidences of recent
+volcanic activity. Geologically recent, I mean. The grasses of the
+flowing plains were very brown, and the molehill craters very dark; the
+larger craters blasted and austere; the higher escarpment in the
+background blue with a solemn distance. The sizes of things were not
+originally fitted out for little tiny people like human beings. We
+walked hours to reach landmarks apparently only a few miles away.
+
+In this manner we crept along industriously until noon, by which time we
+had nearly reached the shoulder of Suswa, around which we had to double.
+The sun was strong, and the men not yet hardened to the work. We had
+many stragglers. After lunch Memba Sasa and I strolled along on a route
+flanking that of the safari, looking for the first of our meat supply.
+Within a short time I had killed a Thompson's gazelle. Some solemn
+giraffes looked on at the performance, and then moved off like
+mechanical toys.
+
+The day lengthened. We were in the midst of wonderful scenery. Our
+objection grew to be that it took so long to put any of it behind us.
+Insensibly, however, we made progress. Suddenly, as it seemed, we found
+ourselves looking at the other side of Suswa, and various brand-new
+little craters had moved up to take the places of our old friends. At
+last, about half-past four, we topped the swell of one of the numerous
+and interminable land billows that undulate across all plains countries
+here, and saw a few miles away the wagon outspanned. We reached it about
+sunset, to be greeted by the welcome news that there was indeed water in
+the pan.
+
+We unsaddled just before dark, and I immediately started towards the
+game herds, many of which were grazing a half-mile away. The gazelle
+would supply our own larder, but meat for hard-worked man was very
+desirable. I shot a hartebeeste, made the prearranged signal for men to
+carry meat, and returned to camp.
+
+Even yet the men were not all in. We took lanterns and returned along
+the road, for the long marches under a desert sun are no joke. At last
+we had accounted for all but two. These we had to abandon. Next day we
+found their loads, but never laid eyes on them again. Thus early our
+twenty-nine became twenty-seven.
+
+About nine o'clock, just as we were turning, a number of lions began to
+roar. Usually a lion roars once or twice by way of satisfaction after
+leaving a kill. These, however, were engaged in driving game, and hence
+trying to make as much noise as possible. We distinguished plainly seven
+individuals, perhaps more. The air trembled with the sound as to the
+deepest tones of a big organ, only the organ is near and enclosed, while
+these vibrations were in the open air and remote. For a few moments the
+great salvos would boom across the veld, roll after roll of thunder;
+then would ensue a momentary dead silence; then a single voice would
+open, to be joined immediately by the others.
+
+We awoke next day to an unexpected cold drizzle. This was a bit
+uncomfortable, from one point of view, and most unusual, but it robbed
+the thirst of its terrors. We were enabled to proceed leisurely, and to
+get a good sleep near water every night. The wagon had, as usual, pulled
+out some time during the night.
+
+Our way led over a succession of low rolling ridges each higher than its
+predecessor. Game herds fed in the shallow valleys between. At about ten
+o'clock we came to the foot of the Mau Escarpment, and also to the
+unexpected sight of the wagon outspanned. N'gombe Brown explained to us
+that the oxen had refused to proceed farther in face of a number of
+lions that came around to sniff at them. Then the rain had come on, and
+he had been unwilling to attempt the Mau while the footing was slippery.
+This sounded reasonable; in fact, it was still reasonable. The grass was
+here fairly neck high, and we found a rain-filled water-hole. Therefore
+we decided to make camp. C. and I wandered out in search of game. We
+tramped a great deal of bold, rugged country, both in cañon bottoms and
+along the open ridges, but found only a rhinoceros, one bush-buck and a
+dozen hartebeeste. African game, as a general rule, avoids a country
+where the grass grows very high. We enjoyed, however, some bold and
+wonderful mountain scenery, and obtained glimpses through the flying
+murk of the vast plains and the base of Suswa. On a precipitous cañon
+cliff we found a hanging garden of cactus and of looped cactus-like
+vines that was a marvel to behold. We ran across the hartebeeste on our
+way home. Our men were already out of meat; the hartebeeste of yesterday
+had disappeared. These porters are a good deal like the old-fashioned
+Michigan lumberjacks--they take a good deal of feeding for the first few
+days. When we came upon the little herd in the neck-high grass, I took a
+shot. At the report the animal went down flat. We wandered over slowly.
+Memba Sasa whetted his knife and walked up. Thereupon Mr. Hartebeeste
+jumped to his feet, flirted his tail gaily, and departed. We followed
+him a mile or so, but he got stronger and gayer every moment, until at
+last he frisked out of the landscape quite strong and hearty. In all my
+African experience I lost only six animals hit by bullets, as I took
+infinite pains and any amount of time to hunt down wounded beasts. This
+animal was, I think, "creased" by too high a shot. Certainly he was not
+much injured; but certainly he got a big shock to start with.
+
+The little herd had gone on. I got down and crawled on hands and knees
+in the thick grass. It was slow work, and I had to travel by landmarks.
+When I finally reckoned I had about reached the proper place, I stood up
+suddenly, my rifle at ready. So dense was the cover and so still the air
+that I had actually crawled right into the middle of the band! While we
+were cutting up the meat the sun broke through strongly.
+
+Therefore the wagon started on up the Mau at six o'clock. Twelve hours
+later we followed. The fine drizzle had set in again. We were very glad
+the wagon had taken advantage of the brief dry time.
+
+From the top of the sheer rise we looked back for the last time over the
+wonderful panorama of the Rift Valley. Before us were wide rounded hills
+covered with a scattered small growth that in general appearance
+resembled scrub oak. It sloped away gently until it was lost in mists.
+Later, when these cleared, we saw distant blue mountains across a
+tremendous shallow basin. We were nearly on a level with the summit of
+Suswa itself, nor did we again drop much below that altitude. After
+five or six miles we overtook the wagon outspanned. The projected
+all-night journey had again been frustrated by the lions. These beasts
+had proved so bold and menacing that finally the team had been forced to
+stop in sheer self-defence. However, the day was cool and overcast, so
+nothing was lost.
+
+After topping the Mau we saw a few gazelle, zebra, and hartebeeste, but
+soon plunged into a bush country quite destitute of game. We were
+paralleling the highest ridge of the escarpment, and so alternated
+between the crossing of cañons and the travelling along broad ridges
+between them. In lack of other amusement for a long time I rode with the
+wagon. The country was very rough and rocky. Everybody was excited to
+the point of frenzy, except the wagon. It had a certain Dutch stolidity
+in its manner of calmly and bumpily surmounting such portions of the
+landscape as happened in its way.
+
+After a very long, tiresome march we camped above a little stream.
+Barring our lucky rain this would have been the first water since
+leaving the Kedong River. Here were hundreds of big blue pigeons
+swooping in to their evening drink.
+
+For two days more we repeated this sort of travel, but always with good
+camps at fair-sized streams. Gradually we slanted away from the main
+ridge, though we still continued cross-cutting the swells and ravines
+thrown off its flanks. Only the ravines hour by hour became shallower,
+and the swells lower and broader. On their tops the scrub sometimes gave
+way to openings of short grass. On these fed a few gazelle of both
+sorts, and an occasional zebra or so. We saw also four topi, a beast
+about the size of our wapiti, built on the general specifications of a
+hartebeeste, but with the most beautiful iridescent plum-coloured coat.
+This quartette was very wild. I made three separate stalks on them, but
+the best I could do was 360 paces, at which range I missed.
+
+Finally we surmounted the last low swell to look down a wide and sloping
+plain to the depression in which flowed the principal river of these
+parts, the Southern Guaso Nyero. Beyond it stretched the immense
+oceanlike plains of the Loieta, from which here and there rose isolated
+hills, very distant, like lonesome ships at sea. A little to the left,
+also very distant, we could make out an unbroken blue range of
+mountains. These were our ultimate destination.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII.
+
+THE SOUTHERN GUASO NYERO.
+
+
+The Southern Guaso Nyero, unlike its northern namesake, is a sluggish,
+muddy stream, rather small, flowing between abrupt clay banks. Farther
+down it drops into great cañons and eroded abysses, and acquires a
+certain grandeur. But here, at the ford of Agate's Drift, it is
+decidedly unimpressive. Scant greenery ornaments its banks. In fact, at
+most places they run hard and baked to a sheer drop-off of ten or
+fifteen feet. Scattered mimosa trees and aloes mark its course. The
+earth for a mile or so is trampled by thousands of Masai cattle that at
+certain seasons pass through the funnel of this, the only ford for
+miles. Apparently insignificant, it is given to sudden, tremendous
+rises. These originate in the rainfalls of the upper Mau Escarpment,
+many miles away. It behooves the safari to cross promptly if it can,
+and to camp always on the farther bank.
+
+This we did, pitching our tents in a little opening, between clumps of
+pretty flowering aloes and the mimosas. Here, as everywhere in this
+country, until we had passed the barrier of the Narossara mountains, the
+common horseflies were a plague. They follow the Masai cattle. I can
+give you no better idea of their numbers than to tell you two isolated
+facts: I killed twenty-one at one blow; and in the morning, before
+sunrise, the apex of our tent held a solid black mass of the creatures
+running the length of the ridge pole, and from half an inch to two
+inches deep! Every pack was black with them on the march, and the wagon
+carried its millions. When the shadow of a branch would cross that
+slowly lumbering vehicle, the swarm would rise and bumble around
+distractedly for a moment before settling down again. They fairly made a
+nimbus of darkness.
+
+After we had made camp we saw a number of Masai warriors hovering about
+the opposite bank, but they did not venture across. Some of their women
+did, however, and came cheerily into camp. These most interesting people
+are worth more than a casual word, so I shall reserve my observations
+on them until a later chapter. One of our porters, a big Baganda named
+Sabakaki, was suffering severely from pains in the chest that
+subsequently developed into pleurisy. From the Masai women we tried to
+buy some of the milk they carried in gourds; at first they seemed not
+averse, but as soon as they realized the milk was not for our own
+consumption, they turned their backs on poor Sabakaki and refused to
+have anything more to do with us.
+
+These Masai are very difficult to trade with. Their only willing barter
+is done in sheep. These they seem to consider legitimate objects of
+commerce. A short distance from our camp stood three whitewashed round
+houses with thatched, conical roofs, the property of a trader named
+Agate. He was away at the time of our visit.
+
+After an early morning, but vain, attempt to get Billy a shot at a
+lion[22] we set out for our distant blue mountains. The day was a
+journey over plains of great variegation. At times they were covered
+with thin scrub; at others with small groves; or again, they were open
+and grassy. Always they undulated gently, so from their tops one never
+saw as far as he thought he was going to see. As landmark we steered by
+a good-sized butte named Donga Rasha.
+
+Memba Sasa and I marched ahead on foot. In this thin scrub we got
+glimpses of many beasts. At one time we were within fifty yards of a
+band of magnificent eland. By fleeting glimpses we saw also many
+wildebeeste and zebra, with occasionally one of the smaller grass
+antelope. Finally, in an open glade we caught sight of something tawny
+showing in the middle of a bush. It was too high off the ground to be a
+buck. We sneaked nearer. At fifty yards we came to a halt, still
+puzzled. Judging by its height and colour, it should be a lion, but try
+as we would we could not make out what part of his anatomy was thus
+visible. At last I made up my mind to give him a shot from the
+Springfield, with the ·405 handy. At the shot the tawny patch heaved and
+lay still. We manoeuvred cautiously, and found we had killed stone dead
+not a lion, but a Bohur reed-buck lying atop an ant hill concealed in
+the middle of the bush. This accounted for its height above the ground.
+As it happened, I very much wanted one of these animals as a specimen,
+so everybody was satisfied.
+
+Shortly after, attracted by a great concourse of carrion birds, both on
+trees and in the air, we penetrated a thicket to come upon a full-grown
+giraffe killed by lions. The claw marks and other indications were
+indubitable. The carcass had been partly eaten, but was rapidly
+vanishing under the attacks of the birds.
+
+Just before noon we passed Donga Rasha and emerged on the open plains.
+Here I caught sight of some Roberts' gazelle, a new species to me, and
+started alone in pursuit. They, as usual, trotted over the nearest rise,
+so with due precautions I followed after. At the top of that rise I lay
+still in astonishment. Before me marched solemnly an unbroken single
+file of game, reaching literally to my limit of vision in both
+directions. They came over the land swell a mile to my left, and they
+were disappearing over another land swell a mile and a half to my right.
+It was rigidly single file, except for the young; the nose of one beast
+fairly touching the tail of the one ahead, and it plodded along at a
+businesslike walk. There were but three species represented--the gnu,
+the zebra, and the hartebeeste. I did not see the head of the
+procession, for it had gone from sight before I arrived; nor did I ever
+see the tail of it either, for the safari appearing inopportunely broke
+its continuance. But I saw two miles and a half, solid, of big game. It
+was a great and formal trek, probably to new pastures.
+
+Then I turned my attention to the Roberts' gazelle, and my good luck
+downed a specimen at 273 yards. This, with the Bohur reed-buck, made the
+second new species for the day. Our luck was not yet over, however. We
+had proceeded but a few miles when Kongoni discovered a herd of topi.
+The safari immediately lay down, while I went ahead. There was little
+cover, and I had a very hard time to get within range, especially as a
+dozen zebras kept grazing across the line of my stalks. The topi
+themselves were very uneasy, crossing and recrossing and looking
+doubtfully in my direction. I had a number of chances at small bucks,
+but refused them in my desire to get a shot at the big leader of the
+herd. Finally he separated from the rest and faced in my direction at
+just 268 yards. At the shot he fell dead.
+
+For the first time we had an opportunity to admire the wonderful pelt.
+It is beautiful in quality, plum colour, with iridescent lights and wavy
+"water marks" changing to pearl colour on the four quarters, with black
+legs. We were both struck with the gorgeousness of a topi motor-rug made
+of three skins, with these pearl spots as accents in the corners. To
+our ambitions and hopes we added more topi.
+
+Our journey to the Narossara River lasted three days in all. We gained
+an outlying spur of the blue mountains, and skirted their base. The
+usual varied foothill country led us through defiles, over ridges, and
+by charming groves. We began to see Masai cattle in great herds. The
+gentle humpbacked beasts were held in close formation by herders afoot,
+tall, lithe young savages with spears. In the distance and through the
+heat haze the beasts shimmered strangely, their glossy reds and whites
+and blacks blending together. In this country of wide expanses and clear
+air we could thus often make out a very far-off herd simply as a speck
+of rich colour against the boundless rolling plains.
+
+Here we saw a good variety of game. Zebras, of course, and hartebeeste;
+the Roberts' gazelle, a few topi, a good many of the gnu or wildebeeste
+discovered and named by Roosevelt; a few giraffes, klipspringer on the
+rocky buttes, cheetah, and the usual jackals, hyenas, etc. I killed one
+very old zebra. So ancient was he that his teeth had worn down to the
+level of the gums, which seemed fairly on the point of closing over.
+Nevertheless he was still fat and sleek. He could not much longer have
+continued to crop the grass. Such extreme age in wild animals is, in
+Africa at least, most remarkable, for generally they meet violent deaths
+while still in their prime.
+
+About three o'clock of the third afternoon we came in sight of a long
+line of forest trees running down parallel with the nearest mountain
+ranges. These marked the course of the Narossara, and by four o'clock we
+were descending the last slope.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[22] See "The Land of Footprints."
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII.
+
+THE LOWER BENCHES.
+
+
+The Narossara is really only about creek size, but as it flows the whole
+year round it merits the title of river. It rises in the junction of a
+long spur with the main ranges, cuts straight across a wide inward bend
+of the mountains, joins them again, plunges down a deep and tremendous
+cañon to the level of a second bench below great cliffs, meanders
+peacefully in flowery meadows and delightful glades for some miles, and
+then once more, and most unexpectedly, drops eighteen hundred feet by
+waterfall and precipitous cascade to join the Southern Guaso Nyero. The
+country around this junction is some of the roughest I saw in Africa.
+
+We camped at the spot where the river ran at about its maximum distance
+from the mountains. Our tents were pitched beneath the shade of tall and
+refreshing trees.
+
+A number of Masai women visited us, laughing and joking with Billy in
+their quizzically humorous fashion. Just as we were sitting down at
+table an Englishman wandered out of the greenery and approached. He was
+a small man with a tremendous red beard, wore loose garments and tennis
+shoes, and strolled up, his hands in his pockets and smoking a
+cigarette. This was V., a man of whom we had heard. A member of a
+historical family, officer in a crack English regiment, he had resigned
+everything to come into this wild country. Here he had built a boma, or
+enclosed compound, and engaged himself in acquiring Masai sheep in
+exchange for beads, wire, and cloth. Obviously the profits of such
+transactions could not be the temptation. He liked the life, and he
+liked his position of influence with these proud and savage people.
+Strangely enough, he cared little for the sporting possibilities of the
+country, though of course he did a little occasional shooting; but was
+quite content with his trading, his growing knowledge of and intimacy
+with the Masai, and his occasional tremendous journeys. To the casual
+and infrequent stranger his attitude was reported most uncertain.
+
+We invited him to tea, which he accepted, and we fell into
+conversation. He and C. were already old acquaintances. The man, I
+found, was shy about talking of the things that interested him; but as
+they most decidedly interested us also we managed to convey an
+impression of our sincerity. Thereafter he was most friendly. His
+helpfulness, kindness, and courtesy could not have been bettered. He
+lent us his own boy as guide down through the cañons of the Narossara to
+the Lower Benches, where we hoped to find kudu; he offered store-room to
+such of our supplies as we intended holding in reserve; he sent us sheep
+and eggs as a welcome variety to our game diet; and in addition he gave
+us Masai implements and ornaments we could not possibly have acquired in
+any other way. It is impossible to buy the personal belongings of this
+proud and independent people at any price. The price of a spear
+ordinarily runs about two rupees' worth, when one trades with any other
+tribe. I know of a case where a Masai was offered fifty rupees for his
+weapon, but refused scornfully. V. acquired these things through
+friendship; and after we had gained his, he was most generous with them.
+Thus he presented us with a thing almost impossible to get and seen
+rarely outside of museums--the Masai war bonnet, made of the mane of a
+lion. It is in shape and appearance, though not in colour, almost
+exactly like the grenadier's shako of the last century. In addition to
+this priceless trophy, V. also gave us samples of the cattle bells, both
+wooden and metal, ivory ear ornaments, bead bracelets, steel collars,
+circumcision knives, sword belts, and other affairs of like value. But I
+think that the _apogée_ of his kindliness was reached when much later he
+heard from the native tribes that we were engaged in penetrating the
+defiles of the higher mountains. Then he sent after us a swift Masai
+runner bearing to us a bottle of whisky and a message to the effect that
+V. was afraid we would find it very cold up there! Think of what that
+meant; turn it well over in your mind, with all the circumstances of
+distance from supplies, difficulty of transportation and all! We none of
+us used whisky in the tropics, so we later returned it with a suitable
+explanation and thanks as being too good to waste.
+
+Next morning, under guidance of our friend's boy, we set out for the
+Lower Benches, leaving N'gombe Brown and his outfit to camp indefinitely
+until we needed him for the return journey.
+
+The whole lie of the land hereabout is, roughly speaking, in a series of
+shelves. Behind us were the high mountains--the Fourth Bench; we had
+been travelling on the plateau of the Loieta--the Third Bench; now we
+were to penetrate some apparently low hills down an unexpected thousand
+feet to the Second Bench. This was smaller, perhaps only five miles at
+its widest. Its outer rim consisted also of low hills concealing a drop
+of precipitous cliffs. There were no passes nor cañons here--the streams
+dropped over in waterfalls--and precarious game trails offered the only
+chance for descent. The First Bench was a mere ledge, a mile or so wide.
+From it one looked down into the deep gorge of the Southern Guaso Nyero,
+and across to a tangle of eroded mountains and malpais that filled the
+eye. Only far off in an incredible distance were other blue mountains
+that marked the other side of the great Rift Valley.
+
+Our present task was to drop from the Third Bench to the Second. For
+some distance we followed the Narossara; then, when it began to drop
+into its tremendous gorge, we continued along the hillsides above it
+until, by means of various "hogs' backs" and tributary cañons, we were
+able to regain its level far below. The going was rough and stony, and
+hard on the porters, but the scenery was very wild and fine. We met the
+river bottom again in the pleasantest oval meadow with fine big trees.
+The mountains quite surrounded us, towering imminent above our heads.
+Ahead of us the stream broke through between portals that rose the full
+height of the ranges. We followed it, and found ourselves on the Second
+Bench.
+
+Here was grass, high grass in which the boys were almost lost to sight.
+Behind us the ramparts rose sheer and high, and over across the way were
+some low fifty-foot cliffs that marked a plateau land. Between the
+plateau and the ranges from which we had descended was a sort of slight
+flat valley through which meandered the forest trees that marked the
+stream.
+
+We turned to the right and marched an hour. The river gradually
+approached the plateau, thus leaving between it and the ramparts a
+considerable plain, and some low foothills. These latter were reported
+to be one of the feeding grounds of the greater kudu.
+
+We made a most delightful camp at the edge of great trees by the stream.
+The water flowed at the bottom of a little ravine, precipitous in most
+places, but with gently sloping banks at the spot we had chosen. It
+flowed rapidly over clean gravel, with a hurrying, tinkling sound. A
+broad gravel beach was spread on the hither side of it, like a spacious
+secret room in the jungle. Here too was a clear little slope on which to
+sit, with the thicket all about, the clean, swift little stream below,
+the high forest arches above, and the inquisitive smaller creatures
+hovering near. Others had been here before us, the wild things, taking
+advantage of the easy descent to drinking water--eland, buffalo,
+leopard, and small bucks. The air was almost cloyingly sweet with a
+perfume like sage-brush honey.
+
+Our first task was to set our boys to work clearing a space; the grass
+was so high and rank that mere trampling had little effect on it. The
+Baganda, Sabakaki, we had been compelled to leave with the ox team. So
+our twenty-seven had become twenty-six.
+
+Next morning C. and I started out very early with one gunbearer. The
+direction of the wind compelled us to a two hours' walk before we could
+begin to hunt. The high grass was soaked with a very heavy dew, and
+shortly we were as wet as though we had fallen into the river. A number
+of hornbills and parrots followed us for some distance, but soon left us
+in peace. We saw the Roberts' gazelle and some hartebeeste.
+
+When we had gained a point of vantage, we turned back and began to work
+slowly along the base of the mountains. We kept on a general level a
+hundred feet or so up their slope, just high enough to give us a point
+of overlook for anything that might stir either in the flat plateau
+foothills or the plains. We also kept a sharp lookout for signs.
+
+We had proceeded in this manner for an hour when in an opening between
+two bushes below us, and perhaps five hundred yards away, we saw a
+leopard standing like a statue, head up, a most beautiful spectacle.
+While we watched her through the glasses, she suddenly dropped flat out
+of sight. The cause we discovered to be three hartebeeste strolling
+sociably along, stopping occasionally to snatch a mouthful, but headed
+always in the direction of the bushes behind which lay the great cat.
+Much interested, we watched them. They disappeared behind the screen. A
+sudden flash marked the leopard's spring. Two badly demoralized
+hartebeeste stamped out into the open and away; two only. The kill had
+been made.
+
+We had only the one rifle with us, for we were supposed to be out after
+kudu only, and were travelling as light as possible. No doubt the
+Springfield would kill a leopard, if the bullet landed in the right
+place. We discussed the matter. It ended, of course, in our sneaking
+down there; I with the Springfield, and C. with his knife unsheathed.
+Our precautions and trepidations were wasted. The leopard had carried
+the hartebeeste bodily some distance, had thrust it under a bush, and
+had departed. C. surmised it would return towards evening.
+
+Therefore we continued after kudu. We found old signs, proving that the
+beasts visited this country, but nothing fresh. We saw, however, the
+first sing-sing, some impalla, some klipspringer, and Chanler's
+reed-buck.
+
+At evening we made a crafty stalk atop the mesa-like foothills to a
+point overlooking the leopard's kill. We lay here looking the place over
+inch by inch through our glasses, when an ejaculation of disgust from
+Kongoni called our attention. There at another spot that confounded
+beast sat like a house cat watching us cynically. Either we had come too
+soon, or she had heard us and retired to what she considered a safe
+distance. There was of course no chance of getting nearer; so I sat
+down, for a steadier hold, and tried her anyway. At the shot she leaped
+high in the air, rolled over once, then recovered her feet and streaked
+off at full speed. Just before disappearing over a slight rise, she
+stopped to look back. I tried her again. We concluded this shot a miss,
+as the distance and light were such that only sheer luck could have
+landed the bullet. However, that luck was with us. Later developments
+showed that both shots had hit. One cut a foreleg, but without breaking
+a bone, and the other had hit the paunch. One was at 380 paces and the
+other at 490.
+
+We found blood on the trail, and followed it a hundred yards and over a
+small ridge to a wide patch of high grass. It was now dark, the grass
+was very high, and the animal probably desperate. The situation did not
+look good to us, badly armed as we were. So we returned to camp,
+resolved to take up the trail again in the morning.
+
+Every man in camp turned out next day to help beat the grass. C., with
+the ·405, stayed to direct and protect the men; while I, with the
+Springfield, sat down at the head of the ravine. Soon I could hear the
+shrieks, rattles, shouts, and whistles of the line of men as they beat
+through the grass. Small grass bucks and hares bounded past me; birds
+came whirring by. I sat on a little ant hill spying as hard as I could
+in all directions. Suddenly the beaters fell to dead silence. Guessing
+this as a signal to me that the beast had been seen, I ran to climb a
+higher ant hill to the left. From there I discerned the animal plainly,
+sneaking along belly to earth, exactly in the manner of a cat after a
+sparrow. It was not a woods-leopard, but the plains-leopard, or cheetah,
+supposed to be a comparatively harmless beast.
+
+At my shot she gave one spring forward and rolled over into the grass.
+The nearest porters yelled, and rushed in. I ran, too, as fast as I
+could, but was not able to make myself heard above the row. An instant
+later the beast came to its feet with a savage growl and charged the
+nearest of the men. She was crippled, and could not move as quickly as
+usual, but could hobble along faster than her intended victim could run.
+This was a tall and very conceited Kavirondo. He fled, but ran around in
+circles in and out of his excited companions. The cheetah followed him,
+and him only, with most single-minded purpose.
+
+I dared not shoot while men were in the line of fire even on the other
+side of the cheetah, for I knew the high-power bullet would at that
+range go right on through, and I fairly split my throat trying to clear
+the way. It seemed five minutes, though it was probably only as many
+seconds, before I got my chance. It was high time. The cheetah had
+reared to strike the man down.[23] My shot bowled her over. She jumped
+to her feet again, made another dash at the thoroughly scared Kavirondo,
+and I killed her just at his coat-tails.
+
+The cheetahs ordinarily are supposed to be cowards, although their size
+and power are equal to that of other leopards. Nobody is afraid of them.
+Yet this particular animal charged with all the ferocity and
+determination of the lion, and would certainly have killed or badly
+mauled my man.[24] To be sure it had been wounded, and had had all night
+to think about it.
+
+In the relief from the tension we all burst into shrieks of laughter;
+all except the near-victim of the scrimmage, who managed only a sickly
+smile. Our mirth was short. Out from a thicket over a hundred yards away
+walked one of the men, who had been in no way involved in the fight,
+calmly announcing that he had been shot. We were sceptical, but he
+turned his back and showed us the bullet hole at the lower edge of the
+ribs. One of my bullets, after passing through the cheetah, had
+ricocheted and picked this poor fellow out from the whole of an empty
+landscape. And this after I had delayed my rescue fairly to the point of
+danger in order to avoid all chance of hurting some one!
+
+We had no means of telling how deeply the bullet had penetrated; so we
+reassured the man, and detailed two men to assist him back to camp by
+easy stages. He did not seem to be suffering much pain, and he had lost
+little strength.
+
+At camp, however, we found that the wound was deep. C. generously
+offered to make a forced march in order to get the boy out to a
+hospital. By hitting directly across the rough country below the benches
+it was possible to shorten the journey somewhat, provided V. could
+persuade the Masai to furnish a guide. The country was a desert, and the
+water scarce. We lined up our remaining twenty-six men and selected the
+twelve best and strongest. These we offered a month and a half's extra
+wages for the trip. We then made a hammock out of one of the ground
+cloths, and the same afternoon C. started. I sent with him four of my
+own men as far as the ox-wagon for the purpose of bringing back more
+supplies. They returned the next afternoon bringing also a report from
+C. that all was well so far, and that he had seen a lion. He made the
+desert trip without other casualty than the lost of his riding mule, and
+landed the wounded man in the hospital all right. In spite of C.'s
+expert care on the journey out, and the best of treatment later, the
+boy, to my great distress, died eleven days after reaching the hospital.
+C. was gone just two weeks.
+
+In the meantime I sent out my best trackers in all directions to look
+for kudu signs, conceiving this the best method of covering the country
+rapidly. In this manner I shortly determined that chances were small
+here, and made up my mind to move down to the edge of the bench where
+the Narossara makes its plunge. Before doing so, however, I hunted for
+and killed a very large eland bull reported by Mavrouki. This beast was
+not only one of the largest I ever saw, but was in especially fine coat.
+He stood five feet six inches high at the shoulder; was nine feet eight
+inches long, without the tail; and would weigh twenty-five hundred
+pounds. The men were delighted with this acquisition. I now had fourteen
+porters, the three gunbearers, the cook, and the two boys. They
+surrounded each tiny fire with switches full of roasting meat; they cut
+off great hunks for a stew; they made quantities of biltong, or jerky.
+
+Next day I left Kongoni and one porter at the old camp, loaded my men
+with what they could carry, and started out. We marched a little over
+two hours; then found ourselves beneath a lone mimosa tree about a
+quarter-mile from the edge of the bench. At this point the stream drops
+into a little cañon preparatory to its plunge; and the plateau rises
+ever so gently in tremendous cliffs. I immediately dispatched the
+porters back for another load. A fine sing-sing lured me across the
+river. I did not get the sing-sing, but had a good fight with two lions,
+as narrated elsewhere.[A]
+
+In this spot we camped a number of days; did a heap of hard climbing and
+spying; killed another lion out of a band of eight;[25] thoroughly
+determined that we had come at the wrong time for kudu, and decided on
+another move.
+
+This time our journey lasted five hours, so that our relaying consumed
+three days. We broke back through the ramparts, by means of another
+pass we had discovered when looking for kudu, to the Third Bench again.
+Here we camped in the valley of Lengeetoto.
+
+This valley is one of the most beautiful and secluded in this part of
+Africa. It is shaped like an ellipse, five or six miles long by about
+three miles wide, and is completely surrounded by mountains. The
+ramparts of the western side--those forming the walls of the Fourth
+Bench--rise in sheer rock cliffs, forest crowned. To the east, from
+which direction we had just come, were high, rounded mountains. At
+sunrise they cut clear in an outline of milky slate against the sky.
+
+The floor of this ellipse was surfaced in gentle undulations, like the
+low swells of a summer sea. Between each swell a singing, clear-watered
+brook leapt and dashed or loitered through its jungle. Into the
+mountains ran broad upward-flung valleys of green grass; and groves of
+great forest trees marched down cañons and out a short distance into the
+plains. Everything was fresh and green and cool. We needed blankets at
+night, and each morning the dew was cool and sparkling, and the sky very
+blue. Underneath the forest trees of the stream beds and the cañon were
+leafy rooms as small as a closet, or great as cathedral aisles. And in
+the short brush dwelt rhinoceros and impalla; in the jungles were
+buffalo and elephant; on the plains we saw giraffe, hartebeeste, zebra,
+duiker; and in the bases of the hills we heard at evening and early
+morning the roaring of lions.
+
+In this charming spot we lingered eight days. Memba Sasa and I spent
+most of our time trying to get one of the jungle-dwelling buffalo
+without his getting us. In this we were finally successful.[26] Then, as
+it was about time for C. to return, we moved back to V.'s boma on the
+Narossara; relaying, as usual, the carrying of our effects. At this time
+I had had to lay off three more men on account of various sorts of
+illness, so was still more cramped for transportation facilities. As we
+were breaking camp a lioness leaped to her feet from where she had been
+lying under a bush. So near was it to camp that I had not my rifle
+ready. She must have been lying there within two hundred yards of our
+tents, watching all our activities.
+
+We drew into V.'s boma a little after two o'clock. The man in charge of
+our tent did not put in an appearance until next day. Fortunately V. had
+an extra tent, which he lent us. We camped near the river, just outside
+the edge of the river forest. The big trees sent their branches out over
+us very far above, while a winding path led us to the banks of the river
+where was a dingle like an inner room. After dark we sat with V. at our
+little camp fire. It was all very beautiful--the skyful of tropical
+stars, the silhouette of the forest shutting them out, the velvet
+blackness of the jungle flickering with fireflies, the purer outlines of
+the hilltops and distant mountains to the left, the porters' tiny fires
+before the little white tents; and in the distance, from the direction
+of V.'s boma, the irregular throb of the dance drum and the occasional
+snatch of barbaric singing borne down on the night wind from where his
+Wakambas were holding an n'goma. A pair of ibis that had been ejected
+when we made camp contributed intermittent outraged and raucous squawks
+from the tiptop of some neighbouring tree.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[23] This is an interesting fact--that she reared to strike instead of
+springing.
+
+[24] It must be remembered that this beast had the evening before killed
+a 350-pound hartebeeste with ease.
+
+[25] "The Land of Footprints."
+
+[26] "The Land of Footprints."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX.
+
+NOTES ON THE MASAI.
+
+
+It is in no way my intention to attempt a comprehensive description of
+this unique people. My personal observation is, of course, inadequate to
+that task, and the numerous careful works on the subject are available
+to the interested reader.
+
+The southern branch of the race, among whom we were now travelling, are
+very fine physically. Men close to seven feet in height are not at all
+uncommon, and the average is well above six. They are strongly and
+lithely made. Their skins are a red-brown or bronze, generally brought
+to a high state of polish by liberal anointing. In feature they resemble
+more the Egyptian or Abyssinian than the negro cast of countenance. The
+women are tall and well formed, with proud, quaintly quizzical faces.
+Their expressions and demeanour seem to indicate more independence and
+initiative than is usual with most savage women, but whether this is
+actually so or not I cannot say.
+
+On this imposing and pleasing physical foundation your true Masai is
+content to build a very slight superstructure of ornament. His ear-lobes
+are always stretched to hang down in long loops, in which small medals,
+ornaments, decorated blocks of wood, or the like, are inserted. Long,
+heavy ovals of ivory, grooved to accommodate the flesh loop, very finely
+etched in decorative designs, are occasionally worn as "stretchers."
+Around the neck is a slender iron collar, and on the arms are one or two
+glittering bracelets. The sword belt is of leather heavily beaded, with
+a short dangling fringe of steel beads. Through this the short blade is
+thrust. When in full dress the warrior further sports a hollow iron knee
+bell, connected with the belt by a string of cowrie shells or beads.
+Often is added a curious triangular strip of skin fitting over the
+chest, and reaching about to the waist. A robe or short cloak of
+short-haired sheepskin is sometimes carried for warmth, but not at all
+for modesty. The weapons are a long, narrow-bladed heavy spear, the
+buffalo hide shield, the short sword, and the war club or rungs. The
+women are always shaven-headed, wear voluminous robes of soft leather,
+and carry a great weight of heavy wire wound into anklets and stockings,
+and brought to a high state of polish. So extensive are these
+decorations that they really form a sort of armour, with breaks only for
+the elbow and the knee joints. The married women wear also a great
+outstanding collar.
+
+The Masai are pastoral, and keep immense herds and flocks. Therefore
+they inhabit the grazing countries, and are nomadic. Their villages are
+invariably arranged in a wide circle, the low huts of mud and wattles
+facing inwards. The spaces between the huts are filled in with thick
+dense thorn brush, thus enclosing a strong corral, or boma. These
+villages are called manyattas. They are built by the women in an
+incredibly brief space of time. Indeed, an overchief stopping two days
+at one place has been known to cause the construction of a complete
+village, to serve only for that period. He then moved on, and the
+manyatta was never used again! Nevertheless these low rounded huts, in
+shape like a loaf of bread, give a fictitious impression of great
+strength and permanency. The smooth and hardened mud resembles masonry
+or concrete work. As a matter of fact it is the thinnest sort of a shell
+over plaited withies. The single entrance to this compound may be
+closed by thorn bush, so that at night, when the lions are abroad, the
+Masai and all his herds dwell quite peaceably and safely inside the
+boma. Twelve to twenty huts constitute a village.
+
+When the grass is fed down, the village moves to a new location. There
+is some regulation about this, determined by the overchiefs, so that one
+village does not interfere with another. Beside the few articles of
+value or of domestic use, the only things carried away from an old
+village are the strongly-woven shield-shaped doors. These are strapped
+along the flanks of the donkeys, while the other goods rest between. A
+donkey pack, Masai fashion, is a marvellous affair that would not stay
+on ten minutes for a white man.
+
+The Masai perform no agriculture whatever, nor will they eat game meat.
+They have no desire whatever for any of the white man's provisions
+except sugar. In fact; their sole habitual diet is mixed cow's blood and
+milk--no fruits, no vegetables, no grains, rarely flesh; a striking
+commentary on extreme vegetarian claims. The blood they obtain by
+shooting a very sharp-pointed arrow into the neck vein of the cow. After
+the requisite amount has been drained, the wound is closed and the
+animal turned into the herd to recuperate. The blood and milk are then
+shaken together in long gourds. Certainly the race seems to thrive on
+this strange diet. Only rarely, on ceremonial occasions or when
+transportation is difficult, do they eat mutton or goat flesh, but never
+beef.
+
+Of labour, then, about a Masai village, it follows that there is
+practically none. The women build the manyattas; there is no cooking, no
+tilling of the soil, no searching for wild fruits. The herd have to be
+watched by day, and driven in at the fall of night; that is the task of
+the boys and the youths who have not gone through with the quadriennial
+circumcision ceremonies and become El-morani, or warriors. Therefore the
+grown men are absolutely and completely gentlemen of leisure. In
+civilization, the less men do the more important they are inclined to
+think themselves. It is so here. Socially the Masai consider themselves
+several cuts above anybody else in the country. As social superiority
+lies mostly in thinking so hard enough--so that the inner belief
+expresses itself in the outward attitude and manner--the Masai carry it
+off. Their haughtiness is magnificent. Also they can look as unsmiling
+and bored as anybody anywhere. Consequently they are either greatly
+admired, or greatly hated and feared, as the case happens to be, by all
+the other tribes. The Kikuyu young men frankly ape the customs and
+ornaments of their powerful neighbours. Even the British Government
+treats them very gingerly indeed, and allows these economically useless
+savages a latitude the more agricultural tribes do not enjoy. Yet I
+submit that any people whose property is in immense herds can more
+easily be brought to terms than those who have nothing so valuable to
+lose.
+
+As a matter of fact the white man and the Masai have never had it out.
+When the English, a few years since, were engaged in opening the country
+they carried on quite a stoutly contested little war with the Wakamba.
+These people put up so good a fight that the English anticipated a most
+bitter struggle with the Masai, whose territory lay next beyond. To
+their surprise the Masai made peace.
+
+"We have watched the war with the Wakamba," they said, in effect, "and
+we have seen the Wakamba kill a great many of your men. But more of your
+men came in always, and there were no more Wakamba to come in and take
+the places of those who were killed. We are not afraid. If we should war
+with you, we would undoubtedly kill a great many of you, and you would
+undoubtedly kill a great many of us. But there can be no use in that. We
+want the ranges for our cattle; you want a road. Let us then agree."
+
+The result is that to-day the Masai look upon themselves as an
+unconquered people, and bear themselves--_towards the other
+tribes_--accordingly. The shrewd common sense and observation evidenced
+above must have convinced them that war now would be hopeless.
+
+This acute intelligence is not at all incompatible with the rather
+bigoted and narrow outlook on life inevitable to a people whose ideals
+are made up of fancied superiorities over the rest of mankind. Witness,
+the feudal aristocracies of the Middle Ages.
+
+With this type the underlying theory of masculine activity is the
+military. Some outlet for energy was needed, and in war it was found.
+Even the ordinary necessities of primitive agriculture and of the chase
+were lacking. The Masai ate neither vegetable, grain, nor wild game. His
+whole young manhood, then, could be spent in no better occupation than
+the pursuit of warlike glory--and cows.
+
+On this rested the peculiar social structure of the people. In perusing
+the following fragmentary account the reader must first of all divest
+his mind of what he would, according to white man's standards, consider
+moral or immoral. Such things must be viewed from the standpoint of the
+people believing in them. The Masai are moral in the sense that they
+very rigorously live up to their own customs and creeds. Their women are
+strictly chaste in the sense that they conduct no affairs outside those
+permitted within the tribe. No doubt, from the Masai point of view, we
+are ourselves immoral.
+
+The small boy, as soon as he is big enough to be responsible--and that
+is very early in life--is given, in company with others, charge of a
+flock of sheep. Thence he graduates to the precious herds of cows. He
+wears little or nothing; is armed with a throwing club (a long stick),
+or perhaps later a broad-bladed, short-headed spear of a pattern
+peculiar to boys and young men. His life is thus over the free open
+hills and veld until, somewhere between the ages of eighteen and
+twenty-one, the year of the circumcision comes. Then he enters on the
+long ceremonies that initiate him into the warrior class. My knowledge
+of the details of this subject is limited; for while I had the luck to
+be in Masailand on the fourth year, such things are not exhibited
+freely. The curious reader can find more on the subject in other books;
+but as this is confined to personal experiences I will tell only what I
+have myself elicited.
+
+The youth's shaved head is allowed to grow its hair. He hangs around his
+brow a dangling string of bright-coloured bird skins stuffed out in the
+shape of little cylinders, so that at a short distance they look like
+curls. For something like a month of probation he wears these, then
+undergoes the rite. For ten days thereafter he and his companions, their
+heads daubed with clay and ashes, clad in long black robes, live out in
+the brush. They have no provision, but are privileged to steal what they
+need. At the end of the ten days they return to the manyattas. A
+three-day n'goma, or dance, now completes their transformation to the
+El-morani class. It finishes by an obscene night dance, in the course of
+which the new warriors select their partners.
+
+For ten or twelve years these young men are El-morani. They dwell in a
+separate manyatta. With them dwell promiscuously all the young unmarried
+women of the tribe. There is no permanent pairing off, no individual
+property, no marriage. Nor does this constitute flagrant immorality,
+difficult as it may be for us to see that fact. The institution, like
+all national institutions, must have had its origin in a very real need
+and a very practical expediency. The fighting strength of the tribe must
+be kept up, and by the young and vigorous stock. On the other hand,
+every man of military age must be foot free to serve in the constant
+wars and forays. This institution is the means. And, mind you,
+unchastity in the form of illicit intercourse outside the manyatta of
+the El-morani, whether with her own or another tribe, subjects the women
+to instant death.
+
+The El-morani in full fighting rig are imposing. They are, as I have
+explained, tall and of fine physique. The cherished and prized weapon is
+the long, narrow-bladed spear. This is five and six feet long, with a
+blade over three feet by as many inches, and with a long iron shoe. In
+fact, only a bare hand-hold of wood is provided. It is of formidable
+weight, but so well balanced that a flip cast with the wrist will drive
+it clear through an enemy. A short sword and a heavy-headed war club
+complete the offensive weapons. The shield is of buffalo hide, oval in
+shape, and decorated with a genuine heraldry, based on genealogy. A
+circlet of black ostrich feathers in some branches surrounds the face
+and stands high above the head. In the southern districts the warriors
+wear two single black ostrich plumes tied one either side the head, and
+slanting a little backwards. They walk with a mincing step, so that the
+two feathers bob gently up and down like the waving of the circus
+equestrienne's filmy skirts.
+
+Naturally the Masai with the Zulu were the most dreaded of all the
+tribes of Africa. They were constantly raiding in all directions as far
+as their sphere of operations could reach, capturing cattle and women as
+the prizes of war. Now that the white man has put a stop to the
+ferocious intertribal wars, the El-morani are out of a job. The military
+organization is still carried on as before. What will happen to the
+morals of the people it would be difficult to say. The twelve years of
+imposed peace have not been long enough seriously to deteriorate the
+people; but, inevitably, complete idleness will tell. Either the people
+must change their ideals and become industrious--which is extremely
+unlikely--or they will degenerate.
+
+As a passing thought, it is a curious and formidable fact that the
+prohibition of intertribal wars and forays all through East Central
+Africa had already permitted the population to increase to a point of
+discomfort. Many of the districts are becoming so crowded as to
+overflow. What will happen in the long run only time can tell--famines
+are weakening things, while war at least hardens a nation's fibre. This
+is not necessarily an argument for war. Only everywhere in the world the
+white man seems, with the best of intentions, to be upsetting natural
+balances without substituting anything for them. We are better at
+preventing things than causing them.
+
+At the age of thirty, or thereabout, the El-morani becomes an Elder. He
+may now drink and smoke, vices that in the Spartan days of his military
+service were rigorously denied him. He may also take a wife or wives,
+according to his means, and keep herds of cattle. His wives he purchases
+from their parents, the usual medium of payment being cows or sheep. The
+young women who have been living in the El-morani village are considered
+quite as desirable as the young virgins. If there are children, these
+are taken over by the husband. They are considered rather a
+recommendation than a detriment, for they prove the girl is fruitful.
+
+Relieved of all responsibility, the ex-warrior now has full leisure to
+be a gentleman. He drinks a fermented liquor made from milk; he takes
+snuff or smokes the rank native tobacco; he conducts interminable
+diplomatic negotiations; he oversees minutely the forms of ceremonials;
+he helps to shape the policies of his manyatta, and he gives his
+attention to the accumulation of cows.
+
+The cow is the one thing that arouses the Masai's full energies. He will
+undertake any journey, any task, any danger, provided the reward
+therefor is horned cattle. And a cow is the one thing he will on no
+account trade, sell, destroy. A very few of them he milks, and a very
+few of them he periodically bleeds; but the majority, to the numbers of
+thousands upon thousands, live uselessly until they die of old age. They
+are branded, generally on the flanks or ribs, with strange large brands,
+and are so constantly handled that they are tamer and more gentle than
+sheep. I have seen upwards of a thousand head in sole charge of two old
+women on foot. These ancient dames drove the beasts in a long file to
+water, then turned them quite easily and drove them back again. Opposite
+our camp they halted their charges and came to make us a long visit. The
+cattle stood in their tracks until the call was over; not one offered
+even to stray off the baked earth in search of grasses.
+
+The Masai cattle king knows his property individually. Each beast has
+its name. Some of the wealthier are worth in cattle, at settler's
+prices, close to a hundred thousand dollars. They are men of importance
+in their own council huts, but they lack many things dear to the savage
+heart simply because they are unwilling to part with a single head of
+stock in order to procure them.
+
+In the old days forays and raids tended more or less to keep the stock
+down. Since the White Man's Peace the herds are increasing. In the
+country between the Mau Escarpment and the Narossara Mountains we found
+the feed eaten down to the earth two months before the next rainy
+season. In the meantime the few settlers are hard put to it to buy
+cattle at any price wherewith to stock their new farms. The situation is
+an anomaly which probably cannot continue. Some check will have
+eventually to be devised, either limiting the cattle, or compelling an
+equitable sale of the surplus. Certainly the present situation
+represents a sad economic waste--of the energies of a fine race
+destined to rust away, and of the lives of tens of thousands of valuable
+beasts brought into existence only to die of old age. If these matchless
+herders and cattle breeders could be brought into relation with the
+world's markets everybody would be the better.
+
+Besides his sacred cattle the Masai raises also lesser herds of the
+hairy sheep of the country. These he used for himself only on the rare
+occasions of solitary forced marches away from his herds, or at the
+times of ceremony. Their real use is as a trading medium--for more
+cattle! Certain white men and Somalis conduct regular trading
+expeditions into Masailand, bringing in small herds of cows bought with
+trade goods from the other tribes. These they barter with the Masai for
+sheep. In Masai estimation a cow is the most valuable thing on earth,
+while a sheep is only a medium of exchange. With such notions it is easy
+to see that the white man can make an advantageous exchange, in spite of
+the Masai's well-known shrewdness at a bargain. Each side is satisfied.
+There remains only to find a market for the sheep--an easy matter. A
+small herd of cows will, in the long run, bring quite a decent profit.
+
+The Masai has very little use for white man's products. He will trade
+for squares of cloth, beads of certain kinds and in a limited quantity,
+brass and iron wire of heavy gauge, blankets and sugar. That, barring
+occasional personal idiosyncrasy, is about all. For these things he will
+pay also in sheep. Masai curios are particularly difficult to get hold
+of. I rather like them for their independence in that respect. I
+certainly should refuse to sell my tennis shoes from my feet merely
+because some casual Chinaman happened to admire them!
+
+The women seem to occupy a position quite satisfactory to themselves. To
+be sure they do the work; but there is not much work! They appear to be
+well treated; at least they are always in good spirits, laughing and
+joking with each other, and always ready with quick repartee to remarks
+flung at them by the safari boys. They visited camp freely, and would
+sit down for a good lively afternoon of joking. Their expressions were
+quizzical, with a shy intelligent humour. In spite of the apparent
+unabashed freedom of their deportment they always behaved with the
+utmost circumspection; nor did our boys ever attempt any familiarity.
+The unobtrusive lounging presence in the background of two warriors
+with long spears may have had something to do with this.
+
+The Masai government is centred in an overlord or king. His orders
+seemed to be implicitly obeyed. The present king I do not know, as the
+old king, Lenani, had just died at an advanced age. In former days the
+traveller on entering Masailand was met by a sub-chief. This man planted
+his long spear upright in the ground, and the intending traveller flung
+over it coils of the heavy wire. A very generous traveller who
+completely covered the spear then had no more trouble. One less lavish
+was likely to be held up for further impositions as he penetrated the
+country. This tax was called the honga.
+
+The Masai language is one of the most difficult of all the native
+tongues. In fact, the white man is almost completely unable even to
+pronounce many of the words. V., who is a "Masai-man," who knows them
+intimately, and who possesses their confidence, does not pretend to talk
+with them in their own tongue, but employs the universal Swahili.
+
+
+
+
+XL.
+
+THROUGH THE ENCHANTED FOREST.
+
+
+We delayed at V.'s boma three days, waiting for C. to turn up. He
+maintained a little force of Wakamba, as the Masai would not take
+service. The Wakamba are a hunting tribe, using both the spear and the
+poisoned arrow to kill their game. Their bows are short and powerful,
+and the arrows exceedingly well fashioned. The poison is made from the
+wood of a certain fat tree, with fruit like gigantic bologna sausages.
+It is cut fine, boiled, and the product evaporated away until only a
+black sticky substance remains. Into this the point of the arrow is
+dipped; and the head is then protected until required by a narrow strip
+of buckskin wound around and around it. I have never witnessed the
+effects of this poison; but V. told me he had seen an eland die in
+twenty-two minutes from so slight a wound in the shoulder that it ran
+barely a hundred yards before stopping. The poison more or less loses
+its efficiency, however, after the sticky, tarlike substance has dried
+out.
+
+I offered a half-rupee as a prize for an archery competition, for I was
+curious to get a view of their marksmanship. The bull's-eye was a piece
+of typewriter paper at thirty paces.[27] This they managed to puncture
+only once out of fifteen tries, though they never missed it very widely.
+V. seemed quite put out at this poor showing, so I suppose they can
+ordinarily do better; but I imagine they are a good deal like our
+hunting Indians--poor shots, but very skilful at stalking close to a
+beast.
+
+Our missing porter, with the tent, was brought in next afternoon by
+Kongoni, who had gone in search of him. The man was a big, strong
+Kavirondo. He was sullen, and merely explained that he was "tired." This
+excuse for a five hours' march after eight days' rest! I fined him eight
+rupees, which I gave Kongoni, and ordered him twenty-five lashes. Six
+weeks later he did the same trick. C. allotted him fifty lashes, and had
+him led thereafter by a short rope around the neck. He was probably
+addicted to opium. This was the only man to be formally kibokoed on the
+whole trip--a good testimony at once to C.'s management, the
+discrimination we had used in picking them out, and the settled
+reputations we had by now acquired.
+
+After C.'s return we prepared to penetrate straight back through the
+great rampart of mountains to the south and west.
+
+We crossed the bush-grown plains, and entered a gently rising long cañon
+flanked on either side by towering ranges that grew higher and higher
+the farther we proceeded. In the very centre of the mountains,
+apparently, this cañon ended in a small round valley. There appeared to
+be no possible exit, save by the way we had come, or over the almost
+perpendicular ridges a thousand feet or more above. Nevertheless, we
+discovered a narrow ravine that slanted up into the hills to the left.
+Following it we found ourselves very shortly in a great forest on the
+side of a mountain. Hanging creepers brushed our faces, tangled vines
+hung across our view, strange and unexpected openings offered themselves
+as a means through which we could see a little closer into the heart of
+mystery. The air was cool and damp and dark. The occasional shafts of
+sunlight or glimpses of blue sky served merely to accentuate the soft
+gloom. Save that we climbed always, we could not tell where we were
+going.
+
+The ascent occupied a little over an hour. Then through the tree trunks
+and undergrowth we caught the sky-line of the crest. When we topped this
+we took a breath, and prepared ourselves for a corresponding descent.
+But in a hundred yards we popped out of the forest to find ourselves on
+a new level. The Fourth Bench had been attained.
+
+It was a grass country of many low, rounded hills and dipping valleys,
+with fine isolated oaklike trees here and there in the depressions, and
+compact, beautiful oaklike groves thrown over the hills like blankets.
+Well-kept, green, trim, intimate, it should have had church spires and
+gray roofs in appropriate spots. It was a refreshment to the eye after
+the great and austere spaces among which we had been dwelling, repose to
+the spirit after the alert and dangerous lands. The dark-curtained
+forest seemed, fancifully, an enchantment through which we had gained to
+this remote smiling land, nearest of all to the blue sky.
+
+We continued south for two days; and then, as the narrative will show,
+were forced to return. We found it always the same type; pleasant sleepy
+little valleys winding around and between low hills crowned with soft
+groves and forests. It was for all the world like northern Surrey, or
+like some of the live oak country of California. Only this we soon
+discovered: in spite of the enchantment of the magic-protecting forest,
+the upper benches too were subject to the spell that lies over all
+Africa. These apparently little valleys were in reality the matter of an
+hour's journey to cross; these rounded hills, to all seeming only two
+good golf strokes from bottom to top, were matters of serious climbing;
+these compact, squared groves of oaklike trees were actually great
+forests of giants in which one could lose one's self for days, in which
+roamed herds of elephant and buffalo. It looked compact because we could
+see all its constituent elements. As a matter of fact, it was neat and
+tidy; only we were, as usual, too small for it.
+
+At the end of two hours' fast marching we had made the distance, say,
+from the clubhouse to the second hole. Then we camped in a genuinely
+little grove of really small trees overlooking a green valley bordered
+with wooded hills. The prospect was indescribably delightful; a sort of
+Sunday-morning landscape of groves and green grass and a feeling of
+church bells.
+
+Only down the valley, diminished by distance, all afternoon Masai
+warriors, in twos and threes, trooped by, mincing along so that their
+own ostrich feathers would bob up and down, their spears held aslant.
+
+We began to realize that we were indeed in a new country when our noon
+thermometer registered only 66 degrees, and when at sunrise the
+following morning it stood at 44 degrees. To us, after eight months
+under the equator, this was bitter weather!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[27] Eight by ten and a half inches.
+
+
+
+
+XLI.
+
+NAIOKOTUKU.
+
+
+Next morning we marched on up the beautiful valley through shoulder-high
+grasses wet with dew. At the end of two hours we came to the limit of
+Leyeye's knowledge of the country. It would now be necessary to find
+savage guides.
+
+Accordingly, while we made camp, C., with Leyeye as interpreter,
+departed in search of a Masai village. So tall and rank grew the grass,
+that we had to clear it out as one would clear brushwood in order to
+make room for our tents.
+
+Several hours later C. returned. He had found a very large village; but
+unfortunately the savages were engaged in a big n'goma which could not
+be interrupted by mere business. However, the chief was coming to make a
+friendly call. When the n'goma should be finished, he would be
+delighted to furnish us with anything we might desire.
+
+Almost on the heels of this the chief arrived. He was a fine old savage,
+over six feet tall, of well proportioned figure, and with a shrewd,
+intelligent face. The n'goma had him to a limited extent, for he
+stumbled over tent ropes, smiled a bit uncertainly, and slumped down
+rather suddenly when he had meant to sit. However, he stumbled, smiled,
+and slumped with unassailable dignity.
+
+From beneath his goatskin robe he produced a long ornamented gourd, from
+which he offered us a drink of fermented milk. He took our refusal
+good-naturedly. The gourd must have held a gallon, but he got away with
+all of its contents in the course of the interview; also several pints
+of super-sweetened coffee which we doled out to him a little at a time,
+and which he seemed to appreciate extravagantly.
+
+Through Leyeye we exchanged the compliments of the day, and, after the
+African custom, told each other how important we were. Our visitor
+turned out to be none other than the brother of Lenani, the paramount
+chief of all the Masai. I forget what I was, either the brother of King
+George or the nephew of Theodore Roosevelt--the only two white men
+_every_ native has heard of. It may be that both of us were mistaken,
+but from his evident authority over a very wide district we were
+inclined to believe our visitor.
+
+We told him we wanted guides through the hills to the southward. He
+promised them in a most friendly fashion.
+
+"I do not know the white man," said he. "I live always in these
+mountains. But my brother Lenani told me ten years ago that some day the
+white man would come into my country. My brother told me that when the
+white man came travelling in my country I must treat him well, for the
+white man is a good friend but a bad enemy. I have remembered my brother
+Lenani's words, though they were spoken a long time ago. The white man
+has been very long in coming; but now he is here. Therefore I have
+brought you milk to-day, and to-morrow I will send you sheep; and later
+I will send young men who know the hills to take you where you wish to
+go."
+
+We expressed gratification, and I presented him with a Marble fish
+knife. The very thin blade and the ingenious manner in which the two
+halves of the handle folded forward over it pleased him immensely.
+
+"No one but myself shall ever use this knife," said he.
+
+He had no pockets, but he tucked it away in his armpit, clamped the
+muscles down over it, and apparently forgot it. At least he gave it no
+further attention, used his hands as usual, but retained it as securely
+as in a pocket.
+
+"To-morrow," he promised at parting, "very early in the morning, I will
+send my own son and another man to guide you; and I will send a sheep
+for your meat."
+
+We arose "very early," packed our few affairs, picked out four
+porters--and sat down to wait. Our plan was to cruise for five days with
+as light and mobile an outfit as possible, and then to return for fresh
+supplies. Billy would take charge of the main camp during our absence.
+As advisers, we left her Abba Ali, Memba Sasa, and Mohammed.
+
+At noon we were still waiting. The possibility of doing a full day's
+journey was gone, but we thought we might at least make a start. At one
+o'clock, just as we had about given up hope, the Masai strolled in. They
+were beautiful, tall, straight youths, finely formed, with proud
+features and a most graceful carriage. In colour they were as though
+made of copper bronze, with the same glitter of high lights from their
+fine-textured skins. Even in this chilly climate they were nearly naked.
+One carried a spear, the other a bow and arrow.
+
+Joyously we uprose--and sat down again. We had provided an excellent
+supply of provisions for our guides; but on looking over the lot they
+discovered nothing--absolutely nothing--that met their ideas.
+
+"What _do_ they want?" we asked Leyeye in despair.
+
+"They say they will eat nothing but sheep," he reported.
+
+We remembered old Naiokotuku's promise of sending us sheep, sneered
+cynically at the faith of savages, and grimly set forth to see what we
+could buy in the surrounding country. But we wronged the old man. Less
+than a mile from camp we met men driving in as presents not one, but
+_two_ sheep. So we abandoned our shopping tour and returned to camp. By
+the time one of the sheep had been made into mutton it was too late to
+start. The Masai showed symptoms of desiring to go back to the village
+for the night. This did not please us. We called them up, and began
+extravagantly to admire their weapons, begging to examine them. Once we
+had them in our hands we craftily discoursed as follows:--
+
+"These are beautiful weapons, the most beautiful we have ever seen.
+Since you are going so spend the night in our camp, and since we greatly
+fear that some of our men might steal these beautiful weapons, we will
+ourselves guard them for you carefully from theft until morning."
+
+So saying, we deposited them inside the tent. Then we knew we had our
+Masai safe. They would never dream of leaving while the most cherished
+of their possessions were in hostage.
+
+
+
+
+XLII.
+
+SCOUTING IN THE ELEPHANT FOREST.
+
+
+Here we were finally off at dawn. It was a very chilly, wet dawn, with
+the fog so thick that we could see not over ten feet ahead. We had four
+porters, carrying about twenty-five pounds apiece of the bare
+necessities, Kongoni, and Leyeye. The Masai struck confidently enough
+through the mist. We crossed neck-deep grass flats--where we were
+thoroughly soaked--climbed hills through a forest, skirted apparently
+for miles an immense reed swamp. As usual when travelling strange
+country in a fog, we experienced that queer feeling of remaining in the
+same spot while fragments of near-by things are slowly paraded by. When
+at length the sun's power cleared the mists, we found ourselves in the
+middle of a forest country of high hills.
+
+Into this forest we now plunged, threading our way here and there where
+the animal trails would take us, looking always for fresh elephant
+spoor. It would have been quite impossible to have moved about in any
+other fashion. The timber grew on hillsides, and was very lofty and
+impressive; and the tropical undergrowth grew tall, rank, and
+impenetrable. We could proceed only by means of the kind assistance of
+the elephant, the buffalo, and the rhinoceros.
+
+Elephant spoor we found, but none made later than three weeks before.
+The trails were broad, solid paths through the forest, as ancient and
+beaten as though they had been in continuous use for years. Unlike the
+rhino and buffalo trails, they gave us head room and to spare. The great
+creatures had by sheer might cut their way through the dense, tough
+growth, leaving twisted, splintered, wrecked jungle behind them, but no
+impediment.
+
+By means of these beautiful trails we went quietly, penetrating farther
+and farther into the jungle. Our little procession of ten made no noise.
+If we should strike fresh elephant tracks, thus would we hunt them, with
+all our worldly goods at our backs, so that at night we could camp right
+on the trail.
+
+The day passed almost without incident.
+
+Once a wild crash and a snort told of a rhinoceros, invisible, but very
+close. We huddled together, our rifles ready, uncertain whether or not
+the animal would burst from the leafy screen at our very faces. The
+Masai stood side by side, the long spear poised, the bow bent, fine,
+tense figures in bronze.
+
+Near sundown we found ourselves by a swift little stream in the bottom
+of a deep ravine. Here we left the men to make camp, and ourselves
+climbed a big mountain on the other side. It gave us a look abroad over
+a wilderness of hills, forested heavily, and a glimpse of the landfall
+far away where no white man had ever been. This was as far south as we
+were destined to get, though at the time we did not know it. Our plan
+was to push on two days more. Near the top of the ridge we found the
+unmistakable tracks of the bongo. This is interesting to zoologists in
+that it extends the southward range of this rare and shy beast.
+
+Just at dark we regained our camp. It was built California fashion--for
+the first and last time in Africa: blankets spread on canvas under the
+open sky and a gipsy fire at our feet, over which I myself cooked our
+very simple meal. As we were smoking our pipes in sleepy content,
+Leyeye and the two Masai appeared for a shauri. Said the Masai,--
+
+"We have taken you over the country we know. There are elephants there
+sometimes, but there are no elephants there now. We can take you
+farther, and if you wish us to do so, we will do so; but we know no more
+of the country than you do. But now if we return to the manyatta
+to-morrow, we can march two hours to where are some Wanderobo; and the
+Wanderobo know this country and will take you through it. If it pleases
+you, one of us will go get the Wanderobo, and the other will stay with
+you to show good faith."
+
+We rolled our eyes at each other in humorous despair. Here at the very
+beginning of the reconnaissance we had run against the stone wall of
+African indirectness and procrastination. And just as we thought we had
+at last settled everything!
+
+"Why," we inquired, "were not the Wanderobo sent at first, instead of
+yourselves?"
+
+"Because," they replied, with truly engaging frankness, "our chief,
+Naiokotuku, thought that perhaps we might find elephant here in the
+country we know; and then we should get for ourselves all the presents
+you would give for finding elephant. But the elephant are not here now,
+so the Wanderobo will get part of the present."
+
+That was certainly candid. After some further talk we decided there was
+no help for it; we must return to camp for a new start.
+
+At this decision the Masai brightened. They volunteered to set off early
+with Leyeye, to push ahead of us rapidly, and to have the Wanderobo in
+camp by the time we reached there. We concealed somewhat cynical smiles,
+and agreed.
+
+The early start was made, but when we reached camp we found, not the
+Wanderobo, but Leyeye and the Masai huddled over a fire. This was
+exasperating, but we could not say much. After all, the whole matter was
+no right of ours, but a manifestation of friendship on the part of
+Naiokotuku. In the early afternoon the sky cleared, and the ambassadors
+departed, promising faithfully to be back before we slept. We spent the
+day writing and in gazing at the vivid view of the hillside, the forest,
+and the distant miniature prospect before us. Finally we discovered what
+made it in essence so strangely familiar. In vividness and clarity--even
+in the crudity of its tones--it was exactly like a coloured photograph!
+
+Of course the savages did not return that evening, nor did we really
+expect them. Just as a matter of form we packed up the next morning, and
+sat down to wait. Shortly before noon Leyeye and the Masai returned,
+bringing with them two of the strange, shy, forest hunters.
+
+But by this time we had talked things over thoroughly. The lure of the
+greater kudu was regaining the strength it had lost by a long series of
+disappointments. We had not time left for both a thorough investigation
+of the forests and a raid in the dry hills of the west after kudu.
+Mavrouki said he knew of a place where that animal ranged. So we had
+come to a decision.
+
+We called the Masai and Wanderobo before us. They squatted in a row,
+their spears planted before them. We sat in canvas chairs. Leyeye
+standing, translated. The affair was naturally of the greatest
+deliberation. In the indirect African manner we began our shauri.
+
+We asked one simple question at a time, dealing with one simple phase of
+the subject. This phase we treated from several different points of
+view, in order to be absolutely certain that it was understood. To these
+questions we received replies in this manner:--
+
+"Yes, the Wanderobo told us," they knew the forest; they knew how to go
+about in the forest; they understood how to find their way in the
+forest. They knew the elephant; they had seen the elephant many times in
+the forest; they knew where the elephant ranged in the forest--and so on
+through every piece of information we desired. It is the usual and only
+sure way of questioning natives.
+
+Thus we learned that the elephant range extended south through the
+forests for about seven days' travel; that at this time of year the
+beasts might be anywhere on that range. This confirmed our decision.
+Then said we to Leyeye:--
+
+"Tell the Masai that the bwana m'kubwa is most pleased with them, and
+that he is pleased with the way they have worked for him, and that he is
+pleased with the presents they have brought him. Tell them that he has
+no goods here with him, but that he has sent men back to the boma of
+bwana Kingozi[28] for blankets and wire and cloth, and when those men
+return he will make a good present to these Masai and to Naiokotuku,
+their chief.
+
+"Tell the Wanderobo that the bwana m'kubwa is pleased with them, and
+that he thanks them for coming so far to tell him of the elephant, and
+that he believes they have told him the truth. Tell them the bwana
+m'kubwa will not fight the elephant now, because he has not the time,
+but must go to attend to his affairs. But later, when two years have
+gone, he will make another safari, and will come back to this country,
+and will again ask these men to lead him out where he can fight the
+elephant. And in the meantime he will give them rupees with which to pay
+their hut tax to the Government."
+
+After various compliments the sitting rose. Then we packed up for a few
+hours' march. In a short time we passed the chief's village. He came out
+to say good-bye. A copper bronze youth accompanied him, lithe as a
+leopard.
+
+"My men have told me your words," said he. "I live always in these
+mountains, and my young men will bring me word when you return. I am
+glad the white men have come to see me. I shall have the Wanderobo ready
+to take you to fight the elephant when you return."
+
+He then instructed the young man to accompany us for the purpose of
+bringing back the presents we had promised. We shook hands in farewell,
+and so parted from this friendly and powerful chief.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[28] V.'s native name--the Master with the Red Beard.
+
+
+
+
+XLIII.
+
+THE TOPI CAMP.
+
+
+At the next camp we stayed for nearly a week.
+
+The country was charming. Mountains surrounded the long ellipse, near
+one edge of which we had pitched our tents. The ellipse was some ten
+miles long by four or five wide, and its surface rolled in easy billows
+to a narrow neck at the lower end. There we could just make out in the
+far distance a conical hill partly closing the neck. Atop the hill was a
+Masai manyatta, very tiny, with indistinct crawling red and brown
+blotches that meant cattle and sheep. Beyond the hill, and through the
+opening in the ellipse, we could see to another new country of hills and
+meadows and forest groves. In this clear air they were microscopically
+distinct. No blue of atmosphere nor shimmer of heat blurred their
+outlines. They were merely made small.
+
+Our camp was made in the open above a tiny stream. We saw wonderful
+sunrises and sunsets, and always spread out before us was the sweep of
+our plains and the unbroken ramparts that hemmed us in. From these
+mountains meandered small stream-ways marked by narrow strips of trees
+and brush, but the most of the valley was of high green grass.
+Occasional ant hills ten feet tall rose conical from the earth; and the
+country was pleasingly broken and modelled, so that one continually
+surmounted knolls, low, round ridges, and the like. Of such conditions
+are surprises made.
+
+The elevation here was some 7,000 feet, so that the nights were cold and
+the days not too warm. Our men did not fancy this change of weather. A
+good many of them came down with the fever always latent in their
+systems, and others suffered from bronchial colds.
+
+At one time we had down sick eleven men out of our slender total.
+However, I believe, in spite of these surface symptoms, that the cold
+air did them good. It certainly improved our own appetites and staying
+power.
+
+In the thirty or forty square miles of our valley were many herds of
+varied game. We here for the first time found Neuman's hartebeeste. The
+type at Narossara, and even in Lengetto, was the common Coke's
+hartebeeste, so that between these closely allied species there
+interposes at this point only the barriers of a climb and a forest.
+These animals and the zebra were the most plentiful of the game. The
+zebra were brilliantly white and black, with magnificent coats.
+Thompson's and Roberts' gazelles were here in considerable numbers,
+eland, Roosevelt's wildebeeste, giraffe, the smaller grass antelopes,
+and a fair number of topi. In the hills we saw buffalo sign, several
+cheetah, and heard many lions.
+
+It had been our first plan that C. should return immediately to V.'s
+boma after supplies, but in view of the abundance of game we decided to
+wait over a day. We much desired to get four topi, and this seemed a
+good chance to carry some of them out. Also we wished to decide for
+certain whether or not the hartebeeste here was really of the Neuman
+variety.
+
+We had great luck. Over the very first hill from camp we came upon a
+herd of about a dozen topi, feeding on a hill across the way. I knocked
+down the first one standing at just 250 paces. The herd then split and
+broke to right and left. By shooting very carefully and steadily I
+managed to kill three more before they were out of range. The last shot
+was at 325 paces. In all I fired seven shots, and hit six times. This
+was the best shooting I did in Africa--or anywhere else--and is a
+first-rate argument for the Springfield and the high velocity,
+sharp-pointed bullet.
+
+Overjoyed at our luck in collecting these animals so promptly, so near
+camp, and at a time so very propitious for handling the trophies, we set
+to the job of skinning and cutting up. The able-bodied men all came out
+from camp to carry in the meat. They appeared, grinning broadly, for
+they had had no meat since leaving the Narossara. C. and I saw matters
+well under way, and then went on to where I had seen a cheetah the day
+before. Hardly were we out of sight when two lions sauntered over the
+hill and proceeded to appropriate the meat! The two men in charge
+promptly withdrew. A moment later a dozen porters on their way out from
+camp topped the hill and began to yell at the lions. The latter then
+slowly and reluctantly retreated.
+
+We were very sorry we had not stayed. The valley seemed populated with
+lions, but in general they were, for some reason, strictly nocturnal.
+By day they inhabited the fastnesses of the mountain ranges. We never
+succeeded in tracing them in that large and labyrinthine country; nor at
+any time could we induce them to come to kills. Either their natural
+prey was so abundant that they did not fancy ready-killed food; or, what
+is more likely, the cold nights prevented the odour of the carcasses
+from carrying far. We heard lions every night; and every morning we
+conscientiously turned out before daybreak to crawl up to our bait
+through the wet, cold grass, but with no results. That very night we
+were jerked from a sound sleep by a tremendous roar almost in camp. So
+close was it that it seemed to each of us but just outside the tent. We
+came up all standing. The lion, apparently, was content with that
+practical joke, for he moved off quietly. Next morning we found where
+the tracks had led down to water, not ten yards away.
+
+We spent the rest of that day spying on the game herds. It is
+fascinating work, to lie belly down on a tall ant hill, glasses steadied
+by elbows, picking out the individual animals and discussing them
+low-voiced with a good companion. C. and I looked over several hundred
+hartebeeste, trying to decide their identity. We were neither of us
+familiar with the animal, and had only recollections of the book
+distinctions. Finally I picked out one that seemed to present the most
+marked characteristics--and missed him clean at 280 yards. Then I took
+three shots at 180 yards to down a second choice. The poor shooting was
+forgotten, however, in our determination that this was indeed Neumanii.
+
+A vain hunt for lions occupied all the next day. The third morning C.
+started for the boma, leaving Billy and me to look about us as we
+willed. Shortly after he had departed a delegation of Masai came in,
+dressed in their best, and bearing presents of milk. Leyeye was summoned
+as interpreter.
+
+The Masai informed us that last night a lion had leapt the thorn walls
+of their boma, had pressed on through the fires, had seized a
+two-year-old steer, and had dragged the beast outside. Then the pursuit
+with spears and firebrands had become too hot for him, so that he had
+dropped his victim and retired. They desired (_a_) medicine for the
+steer, (_b_) magic to keep that lion away, (_c_) that I should assist
+them in hunting the lion down.
+
+I questioned them closely, and soon discovered both that the lion must
+have been very bold, and also that he had received a pretty lively
+reception. Magic to keep him away seemed like a safe enough proposition,
+for the chances were he would keep himself away.
+
+Therefore I filled a quart measure with clear water, passed my hand
+across its untroubled surface--and lo! it turned a clear bright pink!
+
+Long-drawn exclamations of "Eigh! Eigh!" greeted this magic, performed
+by means of permanganate crystals held between the fingers.
+
+"With this bathe the wounds of your steer. Then sprinkle the remainder
+over your cattle. The lion will not return," said I. Then reflecting
+that I was to be some time in the country, and that the lion might get
+over his scare, I added, "The power of this magic is three days."
+
+They departed very much impressed. A little later Memba Sasa and I
+followed them. The manyatta was most picturesquely placed atop the
+conical hill at the foot of the valley. From its elevation we could see
+here and there in the distance the variegated blotches of red and white
+and black that represented the cattle herds. Innumerable flocks of sheep
+and goats, under charge of the small boys and youths, fed nearer at
+hand. The low smooth-plastered huts, with their abattis of thorn bush
+between, crowned the peak like a chaplet. Outside it sat a number of
+elders sunning themselves, and several smiling, good-natured young
+women, probably the spoiled darlings of these plutocrats. One of these
+damsels spake Swahili, so we managed to exchange compliments. They told
+us exactly when and how the lion had gone. Three nimble old gentlemen
+accompanied us when we left. They were armed with spears; and they
+displayed the most extraordinary activity, skipping here and there
+across the ravines and through the brush, casting huge stones into
+likely cover, and generally making themselves ubiquitous. However, we
+did not come up with the lion.
+
+In our clinic that evening appeared one of the men claiming to suffer
+from rheumatism. I suspected him, and still suspect him, of malingering
+in advance in order to get out of the hard work we must soon undertake,
+but had no means of proving my suspicion. However, I decided to
+administer asperin. We possessed only the powdered form of the drug. I
+dumped about five grains on his tongue, and was about to proffer him the
+water with which to wash it down--when he inhaled sharply! I do not know
+the precise effect of asperin in the windpipe, but it is not pleasant.
+The boy thought himself bewitched. His eyes stuck out of his head; he
+gasped painfully; he sank to the ground; he made desperate efforts to
+bolt out into the brush. By main strength we restrained him, and forced
+him to swallow the water. Little by little he recovered. Next night I
+missed him from the clinic, and sent Abba Ali in search. The man assured
+Abba Ali most vehemently that the medicine was wonderful, that every
+trace of rheumatism had departed, that he never felt better in his life,
+and that (important point) he was perfectly able to carry a load on the
+morrow.
+
+
+
+
+XLIV.
+
+THE UNKNOWN LAND.
+
+
+C. returned the next day from V.'s boma, bringing more potio and some
+trade goods. We sent a good present back to Naiokotuku, and prepared for
+an early start into the new country.
+
+We marched out of the lower end of our elliptical valley towards the
+miniature landscape we had seen through the opening. But before we
+reached it we climbed sharp to the right around the end of the
+mountains, made our way through a low pass, and so found ourselves in a
+new country entirely. The smooth, undulating green-grass plains were now
+superseded by lava expanses grown with low bushes. It was almost exactly
+like the sage-brush deserts of Arizona and New Mexico--the same coarse
+sand and lava footing, the same deeply eroded barrancas, the same
+scattered round bushes dotted evenly over the scene. We saw here very
+little game. Across the way lay another range of low mountains clothed
+darkly with dull green, like the chaparral-covered coast ranges of
+California. In one place was a gunsight pass through which we could see
+other distant blue mountains. We crossed the arid plain and toiled up
+through the notch pass.
+
+The latter made very difficult footing indeed, for the entire surface of
+the ground was covered with smooth, slippery boulders and rocks of iron
+and quartz. What had so smoothed them I do not know, for they seemed to
+be ill-placed for water erosion. The boys with their packs atop found
+this hard going, and we ourselves slipped and slid and bumped in spite
+of our caution.
+
+Once through the pass we found ourselves overlooking a wide prospect of
+undulating thorn scrub from which rose occasional bushy hills, solitary
+buttes, and bold cliffs. It was a thick-looking country to make a way
+through.
+
+Nevertheless somewhere here dwelt the Kudu, so in we plunged. The rest
+of the day--and of days to follow--we spent in picking a way through the
+thorn scrub and over loose rocks and shifting stones. A stream bed
+contained an occasional water hole. Tall aloes were ablaze with red
+flowers. The country looked arid, the air felt dry, the atmosphere was
+so clear that a day's journey seemed--usually--but the matter of a few
+hours. Only rarely did we enjoy a few moments of open travel. Most of
+the time the thorns caught at us. In the mountain passes were sometimes
+broad trails of game or of the Masai cattle. The country was harsh and
+dry and beautiful with the grays and dull greens of arid-land brush, or
+with the soft atmospheric tints of arid-land distances. Game was fairly
+common, but rather difficult to find. There were many buffalo, a very
+few zebra, leopards, hyenas, plenty of impalla, some sing-sing, a few
+eland, abundant wart-hog, Thompson's gazelle, and duiker. We never
+lacked for meat when we dared shoot it, but we were after nobler game.
+The sheep given us by Naiokotuku followed along under charge of the
+syces.
+
+When we should run quite out of meat, we intended to eat them. We
+delayed too long, however. One evening the fool boy tied them to a thorn
+bush; one of them pulled back, the thorns bit, and both broke loose and
+departed into the darkness. Of course everybody pursued, but we could
+not recapture them. Ten minutes later the hyenas broke into the most
+unholy laughter. We could not blame them; the joke was certainly on us.
+
+In passing, the cachinnations of the laughing hyena are rather a series
+of high-voiced self-conscious titters than laughter. They sound like the
+stage idea of a lot of silly and rather embarrassed old maids who have
+been accused by some rude man of "taking notice." This call is rarely
+used; indeed, I never heard it but the once. The usual note is a sort of
+moaning howl, impossible to describe, but easy to recognize.
+
+Thus we penetrated gradually deeper and deeper into this wild country;
+through low mountains, over bush-clad plains, into thorn jungles, down
+wide valleys, over hill-divided plateaus. Late in the afternoon we would
+make camp. Sometimes we had good water; more often not. In the evening
+the throb of distant drums and snatches of intermittent wailing song
+rose and fell with the little night breezes.
+
+
+
+
+XLV.
+
+THE ROAN.
+
+
+Our last camp, before turning back, we pitched about two o'clock one
+afternoon. Up to this time we had marched steadily down wide valleys,
+around the end of mountain ranges, moving from one room to the other of
+this hill-divided plateau. At last we ended on a slope that descended
+gently to water. It was grown sparingly with thorn trees, among which we
+raised our tents. Over against us, and across several low swells of
+grass and scrub-grown hills, was a range of mountains. Here, Mavrouki
+claimed, dwelt roan antelope.
+
+We settled down quite happily. The country round about was full of game;
+the weather was cool, the wide sweeps of country, the upward fling of
+mountains and buttes were much like some parts of our great West. Almost
+every evening the thunderstorms made gorgeous piled effects in the
+distance. At night the lions and hyenas roared or howled, and some of
+the tiny fever owls impudently answered them back.
+
+Various adventures came our way, some of which have been elsewhere
+narrated. Here we killed the very big buffalo that nearly got Billy.[29]
+In addition, we collected two more specimens of the Neuman's
+hartebeeste, and two Chanler's reed buck.
+
+But Mavrouki's glowing predictions as to roan were hardly borne out by
+facts. According to him the mountains simply swarmed with them--he had
+seen thirty-five in one day, etc. Of course we had discounted this, but
+some old tracks had to a certain extent borne out his statement.
+
+Lunch time one day, however, found us on top of the highest ridge. Here
+we hunted up a bit of shade, and spent two hours out of the noon sun.
+While we lay there the sky slowly overcast, so that when we aroused
+ourselves to go on, the dazzling light had softened. As time was getting
+short, we decided to separate. Memba Sasa and Mavrouki were to go in one
+direction, while C., Kongoni and I took the other.
+
+Before we started I remarked that I was offering two rupees for the
+capture of a roan.
+
+We had not gone ten minutes when Kongoni turned his head cautiously and
+grinned back at us.
+
+"My rupees," said he.
+
+A fine buck roan stood motionless beneath a tree in the valley below us.
+He was on the other side of the stream jungle, and nearly a mile away.
+While we watched him, he lay down.
+
+Our task now was to gain the shelter of the stream jungle below without
+being seen, to slip along it until opposite the roan, and then to
+penetrate the jungle near enough to get a shot. The first part of this
+contract seemed to us the most difficult, for we were forced to descend
+the face of the hill, like flies crawling down a blackboard, plain for
+him to see.
+
+We slid cautiously from bush to bush; we moved by imperceptible inches
+across the numerous open spaces. About half-way down we were arrested by
+a violent snort ahead. Fifteen or twenty zebras nooning in the brush
+where no zebras were supposed to be, clattered down the hill like an
+avalanche. We froze where we were. The beasts ran fifty yards, then
+wheeled, and started back up the hill, trying to make us out. For twenty
+minutes all parties to the transaction remained stock still, the zebras
+staring, we hoping fervently they would decide to go down the valley and
+not up it, the roan dozing under his distant tree.
+
+By luck our hopes were fulfilled. The zebra turned downstream, walking
+sedately away in single file. When we were certain they had all quite
+gone, we resumed our painful descent.
+
+At length we dropped below the screen of trees, and could stand upright
+and straighten the kinks out of our backs. But now a new complication
+arose. The wind, which had been the very basis of our calculations,
+commenced to chop and veer. Here it blew from one quarter, up there on
+the side hill from another, and through the bushes in quite another
+direction still. Then without warning they would all shift about. We
+watched the tops of the grasses through our binoculars, hoping to read
+some logic into the condition. It was now four o'clock--our stalk had
+thus far consumed two hours--and the roan must soon begin to feed. If we
+were going to do anything, we must do it soon.
+
+Therefore we crept through a very spiky, noisy jungle to its other edge,
+sneaked along the edge until we could make out the tree, and raised
+ourselves for a look. Through the glass I could just make out the
+roan's face stripe. He was still there!
+
+Quite encouraged, I instantly dropped down and crawled to within range.
+When again I raised my head the roan had disappeared. One of these
+aggravating little side puffs of breeze had destroyed our two hours'
+work.
+
+The outlook was not particularly encouraging. We had no means of telling
+how far the animal would go, nor into what sort of country; and the hour
+was well advanced toward sunset. However, we took up the track, and
+proceeded to follow it as well as we could. That was not easy, for the
+ground was hard and stony. Suddenly C. threw himself flat. Of course we
+followed his example. To us he whispered that he thought he had caught a
+glimpse of the animal through an opening and across the stream bed. We
+stalked carefully, and found ourselves in the middle of a small herd of
+topis, one of which, half concealed in the brush, had deceived C. This
+consumed valuable time. When again we had picked up the spoor, it was
+agreed that I was to still-hunt ahead as rapidly as I could, while C.
+and Kongoni would puzzle out the tracks as far as possible before dark.
+
+Therefore I climbed the little rocky ridge on our left, and walked
+along near its crest, keeping a sharp lookout over the valley
+below--much as one would hunt August bucks in California. After two or
+three hundred yards I chanced on a short strip of soft earth in which
+the fresh tracks of the roan going uphill were clearly imprinted. I
+could not without making too much noise inform the others that I had cut
+in ahead of them; so I followed the tracks as cautiously and quietly as
+I could. On the very top of the hill the roan leapt from cover fifty
+yards away, and with a clatter of rocks dashed off down the ridge. The
+grass was very high, and I could see only his head and horns, but I
+dropped the front sight six inches and let drive at a guess. The guess
+happened to be a good one, for he turned a somersault seventy-two yards
+away.
+
+C. and Kongoni came up. The sun had just set. In fifteen minutes it
+would be pitch dark. We dispatched Kongoni for help and lanterns, and
+turned to on the job of building a signal fire and skinning the trophy.
+
+The reason for our strangely chopping wind now became apparent. From our
+elevation we could see piled thunder-clouds looming up from the west.
+They were spreading upward and outward in the swift, rushing manner of
+tropic storms; and I saw I must hustle if I was to get my fire going at
+all. The first little blaze was easy, and after that I had to pile on
+quantities of any wood I could lay my hands to. The deluge blotted out
+every vestige of daylight and nearly drowned out my fire. I had started
+to help C. with the roan, but soon found that I had my own job cut out
+for me, and so went back to nursing my blaze. The water descended in
+sheets. We were immediately soaked through, and very cold. The surface
+of the ground was steep and covered with loose round rocks, and in my
+continuous trips for firewood I stumbled and slipped and ran into thorns
+miserably.[30]
+
+After a long interval of this the lanterns came bobbing through the
+darkness, and a few moments later the dim light revealed the shining
+rain-soaked faces of our men.
+
+We wasted no time in the distribution of burdens. C. with one of the
+lanterns brought up the rear, while I with the other went on ahead.
+
+Now as Kongoni had but this minute completed the round trip to camp, we
+concluded that he would be the best one to give us a lead. This was a
+mistake. He took us out of the hills well enough, and a good job that
+was, for we could not see the length of our arms into the thick, rainy
+blackness, and we had to go entirely by the slants of the country. But
+once in the more open, sloping country, with its innumerable bushy or
+wooded ravines, he began to stray. I felt this from the first; but
+Kongoni insisted strongly he was right, and in the rain and darkness we
+had no way of proving him wrong. In fact I had no reason for thinking
+him wrong; I only felt it. This sense of direction is apparently a fifth
+wheel or extra adjustment some people happen to possess. It has nothing
+to do with acquired knowledge, as is very well proved by the fact that
+in my own case it acts only as long as I do not think about it. As soon
+as I begin consciously to consider the matter I am likely to go wrong.
+Thus many, many times I have back-tracked in the dark over ground I had
+traversed but once before, and have caught myself turning out for bushes
+or trees I could not see, but which my subconscious memory recalled.
+This would happen only when I would think of something besides the way
+home. As soon as I took charge, I groped as badly as the next man. It is
+a curious and sometimes valuable extra, but by no means to be depended
+upon.
+
+Now, however, as I was following Kongoni, this faculty had full play,
+and it assured me vehemently that we were wrong. I called C. up from the
+rear for consultation. Kongoni was very positive he was right; but as we
+had now been walking over an hour, and camp should not have been more
+than three miles from where we had killed the roan, we were inclined
+towards my instinct. So we took the compass direction, in order to
+assure consistency at least, and struck off at full right angles to the
+left.
+
+So we tramped for a long time. Every few moments Kongoni would want
+another look at that compass. It happened that we were now going due
+north, and his notion was that the needle pointed the way to camp. We
+profoundly hoped that his faith in white man's magic would not be
+shattered. At the end of an hour the rain let up, and it cleared
+sufficiently to disclose some of the mountain outlines. They convinced
+us that we were in the main right; though just where, to the north, camp
+now lay was beyond our power to determine. Kongoni's detour had been
+rather indeterminate in direction and distance.
+
+The country now became very rough, in a small way. The feeble light of
+our leading lantern revealed only ghosts and phantoms and looming,
+warning suggestions of things which the shadows confused and shifted.
+Heavily laden men would have found it difficult travelling by prosaic
+daylight; but now, with the added impossibility of picking a route
+ahead, we found ourselves in all sorts of trouble. Many times we had to
+back out and try again. The ghostly flickering tree shapes against the
+fathomless black offered us apparently endless aisles that nevertheless
+closed before us like the doors of a trap when we attempted to enter
+them.
+
+We kept doggedly to the same general northerly direction. When you are
+lost, nothing is more foolish than to make up your mind hastily and
+without due reflection; and nothing is more foolish than to change your
+mind once you have made it up. That way vacillation, confusion, and
+disaster lie. Should you decide, after due consideration of all the
+elements of the problem, that you should go east, then east you go, and
+nothing must turn you. You may get to the Atlantic Ocean if nothing
+else. And if you begin to modify your original plan, then you begin to
+circle. Believe me; I know.
+
+Kongoni was plainly sceptical, and said so until I shut him up with
+some rather peremptory sarcasm. The bearers, who had to stumble in the
+dark under heavy burdens, were good-natured and joking. This we
+appreciated. One can never tell whether or not he is popular with a
+native until he and the native are caught in a dangerous or disagreeable
+fix.
+
+We walked two hours as in a treadmill. Then that invaluable though
+erratic sixth sense of mine awoke. I stopped short.
+
+"I believe we've come far enough," I shouted back to C., and fired my
+rifle.
+
+We received an almost immediate answer from a short distance to the
+left. Not over two hundred yards in that direction we met our camp men
+bearing torches, and so were escorted in triumph after a sixteen-hour
+day.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[29] "The Land of Footprints."
+
+[30] Six months after I had reached home, one of these thorns worked its
+way out of the calf of my leg.
+
+
+
+
+XLVI.
+
+THE GREATER KUDU.
+
+
+Next morning, in a joking manner, I tried to impress Kongoni with a
+sense of delinquency in not knowing better his directions, especially as
+he had twice traversed the route. He declined to be impressed.
+
+"It is not the business of man to walk at night," he replied with
+dignity.
+
+And when you stop to think of it, it certainly is not--in Africa.
+
+At this camp we lingered several days. The great prize of our journeying
+was still lacking, and, to tell the truth, we had about given up hope,
+if not our efforts. Almost we had begun to believe our friends in
+Nairobi who had scoffed at the uselessness of our quest. Always we
+conscientiously looked over good kudu country, hundreds of miles of it,
+and always with the same lack of result, or even of encouragement. Other
+game we saw in plenty, of a dozen different varieties, large and small;
+but our five weeks' search had thus far yielded us only the sight of the
+same old, old sign, made many months before. If you had stood with us
+atop one of the mountains, and with us had looked abroad on the
+countless leagues of rolling brush-clothed land, undulating away in all
+directions over a far horizon, you must with us have estimated as very
+slight the chances of happening on the exact pin point where the kudu at
+that moment happened to be feeding. For the beast is shy, it inhabits
+the densest, closest mountain cover, it possesses the keen eyesight and
+sense of smell of the bush-dwelling deer and antelope, and more than the
+average sense of hearing. There are very few of him. But the chief
+discouragement is that arising from his roaming tendencies. Other rare
+animals are apt to "use" about one locality, so that once the hunter
+finds tracks, new or old, his game is one of patient, skilful search.
+The greater kudu, however, seems in this country at least to be a
+wanderer. He is here to-day and gone to-morrow. Systematic search seems
+as foolish as in the case of the proverbial needle in the haystack. The
+only method is to sift constantly, and trust to luck. One cannot catch
+fish with the fly in the book, but one has at least a chance if one
+keeps it on the water.
+
+Mavrouki was the only one among us who had the living faith that comes
+from having seen the animal in the flesh. That is a curious bit of
+hunter psychology. When a man is out after a species new to him, it is
+only by the utmost stretch of the imagination that he is able to realize
+that such an animal can exist at all. He cannot prefigure it, somehow.
+He generally exaggerates to himself the difficulty of making it out, of
+approaching it, of getting his shot; until at last, if he happens to
+have hunted some time in vain, the beast becomes almost mythical and
+unbelievable. Once he has seen the animal, whether he gets a shot or
+not, all this vanishes. The strain on faith relaxes. He knows what to
+look for, and what to expect; and even if he sees no other specimen for
+a month, he nevertheless goes about the business with a certain
+confidence.
+
+One afternoon we had been hunting carefully certain low mountains, and
+were headed for camp, walking rather carelessly along the bed of a
+narrow, open valley below the bush-covered side hills. The sun had
+disappeared behind the ranges, and the dusk of evening was just
+beginning to rise like a mist from the deeps of the cañons. We had
+ceased hunting--it was time to hurry home--and happened not to be
+talking only because we were tired. By sheerest idle luck I chanced to
+look up to the densely covered face of the mountain. Across a single
+tiny opening in the tall brush five or six hundred yards away, I caught
+a movement. Still idly I lifted my glasses for a look at what I thought
+would prove the usual impalla or sing-sing, and was just in time to
+catch the spirals of a magnificent set of horns. It was the greater kudu
+at last!
+
+I gave a little cluck of caution; and instantly, without question, after
+the African fashion, the three men ahead of me sank to the ground. C.
+looked at me inquiringly. I motioned with my eyes. He raised his glasses
+for one look.
+
+"That's the fellow," he said quietly.
+
+The kudu, as though he had merely stepped into the opening to give us a
+sight of him, melted into the brush.
+
+It was magnificent and exciting to have seen this wonderful beast after
+so long a quest, but by the same token it was not very encouraging for
+all that. If we had had all the daylight we needed, and unlimited time,
+it would have been quite a feat to stalk the wary beast in that thick,
+noisy cover. Now it was almost dark, and would be quite dark within the
+half-hour. The kudu had moved out of sight. Whether he had gone on some
+distance, or whether he still lingered near the edge of the tiny opening
+was another matter to be determined, and to be determined quickly.
+
+Leaving Kongoni and Mavrouki, C. and I wriggled pantingly up the hill,
+as fast and at the same time as cautiously as we could. At the edge of
+the opening we came to a halt, belly down, and began eagerly to
+scrutinize the brush across the way. If the kudu still lingered we had
+to find it out before we ventured out of cover to take up his trail.
+Inch by inch we scrutinized every possible concealment. Finally C.
+breathed sharp with satisfaction. He had caught sight of the tip of one
+horn. With some difficulty he indicated to me where. After staring long
+enough, we could dimly make out the kudu himself browsing, from the
+tender branch-ends.
+
+All we could do was to lie low. If the kudu fed on out of sight into the
+cover, we could not possibly get a shot; if he should happen again to
+cross the opening, we would get a good shot. No one but a hunter can
+understand the panting, dry-mouthed excitement of those minutes; five
+weeks' hard work hung in the balance. The kudu did neither of these
+things; he ceased browsing, took three steps forward, and stood.
+
+The game seemed blocked. The kudu had evidently settled down for a
+snooze; it was impossible, in the situation, to shorten the distance
+without being discovered; the daylight was almost gone; we could make
+out no trace of him except through our glasses. Look as hard as we
+could, we could see nothing with the naked eye. Unless something
+happened within the next two minutes, we would bring nothing into camp
+but the memory of a magnificent beast. And next day he would probably be
+inextricably lost in the wilderness of mountains.[31]
+
+It was a time for desperate measures, and, to C.'s evident doubtful
+anxiety, I took them. Through the glasses the mane of the kudu showed as
+a dim gray streak. Carefully I picked out two twigs on a bush fifteen
+feet from me, and a tuft of grass ten yards on, all of which were in
+line with where the shoulder of the kudu ought to be. Then I lowered my
+glasses. The gray streak of the kudu's mane had disappeared in the
+blending twilight, but I could still see the tips of the twigs and the
+tuft of grass. Very carefully I aligned the sights with these; and, with
+a silent prayer to the Red Gods, loosed the bullet into the darkness.
+
+At the crack of the rifle the kudu leapt into plain sight.
+
+"Hit!" rasped C. in great excitement.
+
+I did not wait to verify this, but fired four times more as fast as I
+could work the bolt. Three of the bullets told. At the last shot he
+crumpled and came rolling down the slope. We both raised a wild whoop of
+triumph, which was answered at once by the expectant gunbearers below.
+
+The finest trophy in Africa was ours!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[31] Trailing for any distance was impossible on account of the stony
+soil.
+
+
+
+
+XLVII.
+
+THE MAGIC PORTALS CLOSE.
+
+
+It seemed hopeless to try for a picture. Nevertheless I opened wide my
+lens, steadied the camera, and gave it a half-second. The result was
+fairly good. So much for a high grade lens. We sent Kongoni into camp
+for help, and ourselves proceeded to build up the usual fire for signal
+and for protection against wild beasts. Then we sat down to enjoy the
+evening, while Mavrouki skinned the kudu.
+
+We looked abroad over a wide stretch of country. Successive low ridges
+crossed our front, each of a different shade of slate gray from its
+neighbours, and a gray half-luminous mist filled the valley between
+them. The edge of the world was thrown sharp against burnished copper.
+After a time the moon rose.
+
+Memba Sasa arrived before the lanterns, out of breath, his face
+streaming with perspiration. Poor Memba Sasa! this was almost the only
+day he had not followed close at my heels, and on this day we had
+captured the Great Prize. No thought of that seemed to affect the
+heartiness of his joy. He rushed up to shake both my hands; he examined
+the kudu with an attention that was held only by great restraint; he let
+go that restrain to shake me again enthusiastically by the hands. After
+him, up the hill, bobbed slowly the lanterns. The smiling bearers
+shouldered the trophy and the meat, and we stumbled home through the
+half shadows and the opalescences of the moonlight.
+
+Our task in this part of the country was now finished. We set out on the
+return journey. The weather changed. A beautiful, bright-copper sunset
+was followed by a drizzle. By morning this had turned into a heavy rain.
+We left the topi camp, to which we had by now returned, cold and
+miserable. C. and I had contributed our waterproofs to protect the
+precious trophies, and we were speedily wet through. The grass was long.
+This was no warm and grateful tropical rain, but a driving, chilling
+storm straight out from the high mountains.
+
+We marched up the long plain, we turned to the left around the base of
+the ranges, we mounted the narrow grass valley, we entered the
+forest--the dark, dripping, and unfriendly forest. Over the edge we
+dropped and clambered down through the hanging vines and the sombre
+trees. By-and-by, we emerged on the open plains below, the plains on the
+hither side of the Narossara, the Africa we had known so long. The rain
+ceased. It was almost as though a magic portal had clicked after us.
+Behind it lay the wonderful secret upper country of the unknown.
+
+
+
+
+XLVIII.
+
+THE LAST TREK.
+
+
+Some weeks later we camped high on the slopes of Suswa, the great
+mountain of the Rift Valley, only one day's march from the railroad.
+After the capture of the kudu Africa still held for us various
+adventures--a buffalo, a go of fever, and the like--but the culmination
+had been reached. We had lingered until the latest moment, reluctant to
+go. Now in the gray dawn we were filing down the slopes of the mountains
+for the last trek. A low, flowing mist marked the distant Kedong; the
+flames of an African sunrise were revelling in the eastern skies. All
+our old friends seemed to be bidding us good-bye. Around the shoulder of
+the mountains a lion roared, rumble upon rumble. Two hyenas leapt from
+the grass, ran fifty yards, and turned to look at us.
+
+"Good-bye, simba! good-bye, fice!" we cried to them sadly.
+
+A little farther we saw zebra, and the hartebeeste, and the gazelles.
+One by one appeared and disappeared again the beasts with which we had
+grown so familiar during our long months in the jungle. So remarkable
+was the number of species that we both began to comment upon the fact,
+to greet the animals, to bid them farewell, as though they were
+reporting in order from the jungle to bid us God-speed. Half in earnest
+we waved our hands to them and shouted our greetings to them in the
+native--punda milia, kongoni, pa-a, fice, m'pofu, twiga, simba,
+n'grooui, and the rest. Before our eyes the misty ranges hardened and
+stiffened under the fierce sun. Our men marched steadily, cheerfully,
+beating their loads in rhythm with their safari sticks, crooning under
+their breaths, and occasionally breaking into full-voiced chant. They
+were glad to be back from the long safari, back from across the Thirst,
+from the high, cold country, from the dangers and discomforts of the
+unknown. We rode a little wistfully, for these great plains and
+mysterious jungles, these populous, dangerous, many-voiced nights, these
+flaming, splendid dawnings and day-falls, these fierce, shimmering noons
+we were to know no more.
+
+Two days we had in Nairobi before going to the coast. There we paid off
+and dismissed our men, giving them presents according to the length and
+faithfulness of their service. They took them and departed, eagerly, as
+was natural, to the families and the pleasures from which they had been
+so long separated. Mohammed said good-bye, and went, and was sorry;
+Kongoni departed, after many and sincere protestations; quiet little
+Mavrouki came back three times to shake hands again, and disappeared
+reluctantly--but disappeared; Leyeye went; Abba Ali followed the service
+of his master, C.; "Timothy" received his present--in which he was
+disappointed--and departed with salaams. Only Memba Sasa remained. I
+paid him for his long service, and I gave him many and rich presents,
+and bade farewell to him with genuine regret and affection.
+
+Memba Sasa had wives and a farm near town, neither of which possessions
+he had seen for a very long while. Nevertheless he made no move to see
+them. When our final interview had terminated with the usual "Bags" (It
+is finished), he shook hands once more and withdrew, but only to take
+his position across the street. There he squatted on his heels, fixed
+his eyes upon me, and remained. I went down town on business. Happening
+to glance through the office window I caught sight of Memba Sasa again
+across the street, squatted on his heels, his gaze fixed unwaveringly on
+my face. So it was for two days. When I tried to approach him, he glided
+away, so that I got no further speech with him; but always, quietly and
+unobtrusively, he returned to where he could see me plainly. He
+considered that our interview had terminated our official relations, but
+he wanted to see the last of the bwana with whom he had journeyed so
+far.
+
+One makes many acquaintances as one knocks about the world; and once in
+a great many moons one finds a friend--a man the mere fact of whose
+existence one is glad to realize, whether one ever sees him again or
+not. These are not many, and they are of various degree. Among them I am
+glad to number this fierce savage. He was efficient, self-respecting,
+brave, staunch, and loyal with a great loyalty. I do not think I can
+better end this book than by this feeble tribute to a man whose
+opportunities were not many, but whose soul was great.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+     BOOKS BY STEWART EDWARD WHITE.
+
+
+     "_Mr. Stewart Edward White is a Thomas Hardy, so to
+     speak, of the primeval forests of the Far West, and of the
+     great rivers that run out of them over the brink of evening.
+     His large, still novels will live on as a kind of social
+     history_."--_The Morning Post_.
+
+
+     THE LAND OF FOOTPRINTS  2s. net.
+
+     "The best book of travel in Africa that has been published for
+     many years."--_The Nottingham Daily Express_.
+
+     "It is more than a thrilling story of adventure, for Mr. White
+     shows that he is a man of broad sympathies and understanding, and
+     can not only deal successfully with primitive tribes, but really knows
+     them."--_Punch_.
+
+
+     THE CABIN               2s. net.
+
+     "'The Cabin' is a pure delight. We read of a husband and wife
+     camping out in a little shanty in the heart of a Californian
+     forest--that is all the story; but around it grows chapter after
+     chapter of      sagacity and fun and insight, and a deep joy in
+     beauty and living things. And all is given to us as simply and
+     sincerely as it was lived through and thought through."
+     --_The Nation_.
+
+
+     THE FOREST              1s. net.
+
+
+     RULES OF THE GAME       7d. net.
+
+
+     THE BLAZED TRAIL        7d. net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's African Camp Fires, by Stewart Edward White
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of African Camp Fires, by Stewart Edward White
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: African Camp Fires
+
+Author: Stewart Edward White
+
+Release Date: December 24, 2004 [EBook #14451]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AFRICAN CAMP FIRES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Steven Gibbs and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+  <H1>AFRICAN CAMP FIRES</H1>
+
+  <H3>BY</H3>
+
+  <H2>STEWART EDWARD WHITE</H2><SPAN style=
+  'margin-left: 2.5em;'>THOMAS NELSON AND SONS</SPAN><BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>LONDON, EDINBURGH,
+  DUBLIN</SPAN><BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>AND NEW YORK</SPAN><BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>[1914]</SPAN><BR>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+
+  <CENTER>
+    <IMG src="images/frontispiece.jpg" alt=
+    "Trophy room of the author" title="Trophy room of the author"
+    width="495" height="352">
+  </CENTER>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+
+  <H2>CONTENTS.</H2><A href='#PART_I'><B>PART I.</B></A>&mdash;TO
+  THE ISLAND OF WAR.<BR>
+  <A href='#I'><B>I.</B></A> THE OPEN DOOR<BR>
+  <A href='#II'><B>II.</B></A> THE FAREWELL<BR>
+  <A href='#III'><B>III.</B></A> PORT SAID<BR>
+  <A href='#IV'><B>IV.</B></A> SUEZ<BR>
+  <A href='#V'><B>V.</B></A> THE RED SEA<BR>
+  <A href='#VI'><B>VI.</B></A> ADEN<BR>
+  <A href='#VII'><B>VII.</B></A> THE INDIAN OCEAN<BR>
+  <A href='#VIII'><B>VIII.</B></A> MOMBASA<BR>
+  <BR>
+  <A href='#PART_II'><B>PART II.</B></A>&mdash;THE SHIMBA
+  HILLS.<BR>
+  <A href='#IX'><B>IX.</B></A> A TROPICAL JUNGLE<BR>
+  <A href='#X'><B>X.</B></A> THE SABLE<BR>
+  <A href='#XI'><B>XI.</B></A> A MARCH ALONG THE COAST<BR>
+  <A href='#XII'><B>XII.</B></A> THE FIRE<BR>
+  <BR>
+  <A href='#PART_III'><B>PART III.</B></A>&mdash;NAIROBI.<BR>
+  <A href='#XIII'><B>XIII.</B></A> UP FROM THE COAST<BR>
+  <A href='#XIV'><B>XIV.</B></A> A TOWN OF CONTRASTS<BR>
+  <A href='#XV'><B>XV.</B></A> PEOPLE<BR>
+  <A href='#XVI'><B>XVI.</B></A> RECRUITING<BR>
+  <BR>
+  <A href='#PART_IV'><B>PART IV.</B></A>&mdash;A LION HUNT ON
+  KAPITI.<BR>
+  <A href='#XVII'><B>XVII.</B></A> AN OSTRICH FARM AT MACHAKOS<BR>
+  <A href='#XVIII'><B>XVIII</B></A> THE FIRST LIONESS<BR>
+  <A href='#XIX'><B>XIX.</B></A> THE DOGS<BR>
+  <A href='#XX'><B>XX.</B></A> BONDONI<BR>
+  <A href='#XXI'><B>XXI.</B></A> RIDING THE PLAINS<BR>
+  <A href='#XXII'><B>XXII.</B></A> THE SECOND LIONESS<BR>
+  <A href='#XXIII'><B>XXIII.</B></A> THE BIG LION<BR>
+  <A href='#XXIV'><B>XXIV.</B></A> THE FIFTEEN LIONS<BR>
+  <BR>
+  <A href='#PART_V'><B>PART V.</B></A>&mdash;THE TSAVO RIVER.<BR>
+  <A href='#XXV'><B>XXV.</B></A> VOI<BR>
+  <A href='#XXVI'><B>XXVI.</B></A> THE FRINGE-EARED ORYX<BR>
+  <A href='#XXVII'><B>XXVII.</B></A> ACROSS THE SERENGETTI<BR>
+  <A href='#XXVIII'><B>XXVIII.</B></A> DOWN THE RIVER<BR>
+  <A href='#XXIX'><B>XXIX.</B></A> THE LESSER KUDU<BR>
+  <A href='#XXX'><B>XXX.</B></A> ADVENTURES BY THE WAY<BR>
+  <A href='#XXXI'><B>XXXI.</B></A> THE LOST SAFARI<BR>
+  <A href='#XXXII'><B>XXXII.</B></A> THE BABU<BR>
+  <BR>
+  <A href='#PART_VI'><B>PART VI.</B></A>&mdash;IN MASAILAND.<BR>
+  <A href='#XXXIII'><B>XXXIII.</B></A> OVER THE LIKIPIA
+  ESCARPMENT<BR>
+  <A href='#XXXIV'><B>XXXIV.</B></A> TO THE KEDONG<BR>
+  <A href='#XXXV'><B>XXXV.</B></A> THE TEANSPORT RIDER<BR>
+  <A href='#XXXVI'><B>XXXVI.</B></A> ACROSS THE THIRST<BR>
+  <A href='#XXXVII'><B>XXXVII.</B></A> THE SOUTHERN GUASO NYERO<BR>
+  <A href='#XXXVIII'><B>XXXVIII.</B></A> THE LOWER BENCHES<BR>
+  <A href='#XXXIX'><B>XXXIX.</B></A> NOTES ON THE MASAI<BR>
+  <A href='#XL'><B>XL.</B></A> THROUGH THE ENCHANTED FOREST<BR>
+  <A href='#XLI'><B>XLI.</B></A> NAIOKOTUKU<BR>
+  <A href='#XLII'><B>XLII.</B></A> SCOUTING IN THE ELEPHANT
+  FOREST<BR>
+  <A href='#XLIII'><B>XLIII.</B></A> THE TOPI CAMP<BR>
+  <A href='#XLIV'><B>XLIV.</B></A> THE UNKNOWN LAND<BR>
+  <A href='#XLV'><B>XLV.</B></A> THE ROAN<BR>
+  <A href='#XLVI'><B>XLVI.</B></A> THE GREATER KUDU<BR>
+  <A href='#XLVII'><B>XLVII.</B></A> THE MAGIC PORTALS CLOSE<BR>
+  <A href='#XLVIII'><B>XLVIII.</B></A> THE LAST TREK
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='PART_I' id="PART_I"></A>
+
+  <H2>PART I.</H2><BR>
+
+  <P>TO THE ISLAND OF WAR.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='I' id="I"></A>
+
+  <H2>I.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE OPEN DOOR.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>There are many interesting hotels scattered about the world,
+  with a few of which I am acquainted and with a great many of
+  which I am not. Of course all hotels are interesting, from one
+  point of view or another. In fact, the surest way to fix an
+  audience's attention is to introduce your hero, or to display
+  your opening chorus in the lobby or along the fa&ccedil;ade of a
+  hotel. The life, the movement and colour, the drifting
+  individualities, the pretence, the bluff, the self-consciousness,
+  the independence, the <I>ennui</I>, the darting or lounging
+  servants, the very fact that of those before your eyes seven out
+  of ten are drawn from distant and scattered places, are
+  sufficient in themselves to invest the smallest hostelry with
+  glamour. It is not of this general interest that I would now
+  speak. Nor is it my intention at present to glance at the hotels
+  wherein "quaintness" is specialized, whether intentionally or no.
+  There are thousands of them; and all of them well worth the
+  discriminating traveller's attention. Concerning some of
+  them&mdash;as the old inns at Dives-sur-Mer and at Mont St.
+  Michel&mdash;whole books have been written. These depend for
+  their charm on a mingled gift of the unusual and the picturesque.
+  There are, as I have said, thousands of them; and of their
+  cataloguing, should one embark on so wide a sea, there could be
+  no end. And, again, I must for convenience exclude the altogether
+  charming places, like the Tour d'Argent of Paris, Simpson's of
+  the Strand,<A name='FNanchor_1_1' id="FNanchor_1_1"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_1_1'><SUP>[1]</SUP></A> and a dozen others that will
+  spring to every traveller's memory, where the personality of the
+  host, or of a chef, or even a waiter, is at once a magnet for the
+  attraction of visitors and a reward for their coming. These, too,
+  are many. In the interest to which I would draw attention, the
+  hotel as a building or as an institution has little part. It is
+  indeed a fa&ccedil;ade, a <I>mise en sc&egrave;ne</I>before which
+  play the actors that attract our attention and applause. The set
+  may be as modernly elaborate as Peacock Alley of the Waldorf or
+  the templed lobby of the St. Francis; or it may present the
+  severe and Elizabethan simplicity of the stone-paved veranda of
+  the Norfolk at Nairobi&mdash;the matter is quite inessential to
+  the spectator. His appreciation is only slightly and indirectly
+  influenced by these things. Sunk in his arm-chair&mdash;of velvet
+  or of canvas&mdash;he puffs hard and silently at his cigar,
+  watching and listening as the pageant and the conversation eddy
+  by.</P>
+
+  <P>Of such hotels I number that gaudy and polysyllabic hostelry
+  the Grand H&ocirc;tel du Louvre et de la Paix at Marseilles. I am
+  indifferent to the facts that it is situated on that fine
+  thoroughfare, the Rue de Cannebi&egrave;re, which the proud and
+  untravelled native devoutly believes to be the finest street in
+  the world; that it possesses a dining-room of gilded and painted
+  <I>repouss&eacute;</I> work so elaborate and wonderful that it
+  surely must be intended to represent a tinsmith's dream of
+  heaven; that its concierge is the most impressive human being on
+  earth except Ludwig von Kampf (whom I have never seen); that its
+  head waiter is sadder and more elderly and forgiving than any
+  other head waiter; and that its hushed and cathedral atmosphere
+  has been undisturbed through immemorial years. That is to be
+  expected; and elsewhere to be duplicated in greater or lesser
+  degree. Nor in the lofty courtyard, or the equally lofty halls
+  and reading-rooms, is there ever much bustle and movement. People
+  sit quietly, or move with circumspection. Servants glide. The
+  fall of a book or teaspoon, the sudden closing of a door, are
+  events to be remarked. Once a day, however, a huge gong sounds,
+  the glass doors of the inner courtyard are thrown open with a
+  flourish, and enters the huge bus fairly among those peacefully
+  sitting at the tables, horses' hoofs striking fire, long
+  lash-cracking volleys, wheels roaring amid hollow reverberations.
+  From the interior of this bus emerge people; and from the top, by
+  means of a strangely-constructed hooked ladder, are decanted
+  boxes, trunks, and appurtenances of various sorts. In these
+  people, and in these boxes, trunks, and appurtenances, are the
+  real interest of the Grand H&ocirc;tel du Louvre et de la Paix of
+  the marvellous Rue Cannebi&egrave;re of Marseilles.</P>
+
+  <P>For at Marseilles land ships, many ships, from all the
+  scattered ends of the earth; and from Marseilles depart trains
+  for the North, where is home, or the way home for many peoples.
+  And since the arrival of ships is uncertain, and the departure of
+  trains fixed, it follows that everybody descends for a little or
+  greater period at the Grand H&ocirc;tel du Louvre et de la
+  Paix.</P>
+
+  <P>They come lean and quiet and a little yellow from hard
+  climates, with the names of strange places on their lips, and
+  they speak familiarly of far-off things. Their clothes are
+  generally of ancient cut, and the wrinkles and camphor aroma of a
+  long packing away are yet discernible. Often they are still
+  wearing sun helmets or double terai hats, pending a descent on a
+  Piccadilly hatter two days hence. They move slowly and languidly;
+  the ordinary piercing and dominant English enunciation has fallen
+  to modulation; their eyes, while observant and alert, look tired.
+  It is as though the far countries have sucked something from the
+  pith of them in exchange for great experiences that nevertheless
+  seem of little value; as though these men, having met at last
+  face to face the ultimate of what the earth has to offer in the
+  way of danger, hardship, difficulty, and the things that try
+  men's souls, having unexpectedly found them all to fall short of
+  both the importance and the final significance with which
+  human-kind has always invested them, were now just a little at a
+  loss. Therefore they stretch their long, lean frames in the
+  wicker chairs, they sip the long drinks at their elbows, puff
+  slowly at their long, lean cheroots, and talk spasmodically in
+  short sentences.</P>
+
+  <P>Of quite a different type are those going out&mdash;young
+  fellows full of northern health and energy, full of the eagerness
+  of anticipation, full of romance skilfully concealed,
+  self-certain, authoritative, clear voiced. Their exit from the
+  bus is followed by a rain of hold-alls, bags, new tin boxes, new
+  gun cases, all lettered freshly&mdash;an enormous kit doomed to
+  diminution. They overflow the place, ebb towards their respective
+  rooms; return scrubbed and ruddy, correctly clad, correctly
+  unconscious of everybody else; sink into more wicker chairs. The
+  quiet brown and yellow men continue to puff at their cheroots,
+  quite eclipsed. After a time one of them picks up his battered
+  old sun helmet and goes out into the street. The eyes of the
+  newcomers follow him. They fall silent; and their eyes, under
+  cover of pulled moustache, furtively glance towards the lean
+  man's companions. Then on that office falls a great silence,
+  broken only by the occasional rare remarks of the quiet men with
+  the cheroots. The youngsters are listening with all their ears,
+  though from their appearance no one would suspect that fact. Not
+  a syllable escapes them. These quiet men have been there; they
+  have seen with their own eyes; their lightest word is saturated
+  with the mystery and romance of the unknown. Their easy,
+  matter-of-fact, everyday knowledge is richly wonderful. It would
+  seem natural for these young-young men to question these
+  old-young men of that which they desire so ardently to know; but
+  that isn't done, you know. So they sit tight, and pretend they
+  are not listening, and feast their ears on the wonderful
+  syllables&mdash;Ankobar, Kabul, Peshawur, Annam, Nyassaland,
+  Kerman, Serengetti, Tanganika, and many others. On these
+  beautiful syllables must their imaginations feed, for that which
+  is told is as nothing at all. Adventure there is none, romance
+  there is none, mention of high emprise there is none. Adventure,
+  romance, high emprise have to these men somehow lost their
+  importance. Perhaps such things have been to them too
+  common&mdash;as well mention the morning egg. Perhaps they have
+  found that there is no genuine adventure, no real romance except
+  over the edge of the world where the rainbow stoops.</P>
+
+  <P>The bus rattles in and rattles out again. It takes the
+  fresh-faced young men down past the inner harbour to where lie
+  the tall ships waiting. They and their cargo of exuberance, of
+  hope, of energy, of thirst for the bubble adventure, the rainbow
+  romance, sail away to where these wares have a market. And the
+  quiet men glide away to the North. Their wares have been
+  marketed. The sleepy, fierce, passionate, sunny lands have taken
+  all they had to bring. And have given in exchange? Indifference,
+  ill-health, a profound realization that the length of days are as
+  nothing at all; a supreme agnosticism as to the ultimate value of
+  anything that a single man can do, a sublime faith that it must
+  be done, the power to concentrate, patience illimitable; contempt
+  for danger, disregard of death, the intention to live; a final,
+  weary estimate of the fact that mere things are as unimportant
+  here as there, no matter how quaintly or fantastically they are
+  dressed or named, and a corresponding emptiness of anticipation
+  for the future&mdash;these items are only a random few of the
+  price given by the ancient lands for that which the northern
+  races bring to them. What other alchemical changes have been
+  wrought only these lean and weary men could know&mdash;if they
+  dared look so far within themselves. And even if they dared, they
+  would not tell.</P>
+
+  <P>FOOTNOTES:</P><A name='Footnote_1_1' id=
+  "Footnote_1_1"></A><A href='#FNanchor_1_1'>[1]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>In old days before the "improvements."</P>
+  </DIV>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='II' id="II"></A>
+
+  <H2>II.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE FAREWELL.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>We boarded ship, filled with a great, and what seemed to us,
+  an unappeasable curiosity as to what we were going to see. It was
+  not a very big ship, in spite of the grandiloquent descriptions
+  in the advertisements, or the lithograph wherein she cut grandly
+  and evenly through huge waves to the manifest discomfiture of
+  infinitesimal sailing craft bobbing alongside. She was manned
+  entirely by Germans. The room stewards waited at table, cleaned
+  the public saloons, kept the library, rustled the baggage, and
+  played in the band. That is why we took our music between meals.
+  Our staterooms were very tiny indeed. Each was provided with an
+  electric fan; a totally inadequate and rather aggravating
+  electric fan once we had entered the Red Sea. Just at this moment
+  we paid it little attention, for we were still in full enjoyment
+  of sunny France, where, in our own experience, it had rained two
+  months steadily. Indeed, at this moment it was raining, raining a
+  steady, cold, sodden drizzle that had not even the grace to pick
+  out the surface of the harbour in the jolly dancing staccato that
+  goes far to lend attraction to a genuinely earnest rainstorm.</P>
+
+  <P>Down the long quay splashed cabs and omnibuses, their drivers
+  glistening in wet capes, to discharge under the open shed at the
+  end various hasty individuals who marshalled long lines of
+  porters with astonishing impedimenta and drove them up the
+  gang-plank. A half-dozen roughs lounged aimlessly. A little bent
+  old woman with a shawl over her head searched here and there.
+  Occasionally she would find a twisted splinter of wood torn from
+  the piles by a hawser or gouged from the planking by heavy
+  freight, or kicked from the floor by the hoofs of horses. This
+  she deposited carefully in a small covered market basket. She was
+  entirely intent on this minute and rather pathetic task, quite
+  unattending the greatness of the ship, or the many people the
+  great hulk swallowed or spat forth.</P>
+
+  <P>Near us against the rail leaned a dark-haired young Englishman
+  whom later every man on that many-nationed ship came to recognize
+  and to avoid as an insufferable bore. Now, however, the angel of
+  good inspiration stooped to him. He tossed a copper two-sou piece
+  down to the bent old woman. She heard the clink of the fall, and
+  looked up bewildered. One of the waterside roughs slouched
+  forward. The Englishman shouted a warning and a threat,
+  indicating in pantomime for whom the coin was intended. To our
+  surprise that evil-looking wharf rat smiled and waved his hand
+  reassuringly, then took the old woman by the arm to show her
+  where the coin had fallen. She hobbled to it with a haste
+  eloquent of the horrible Marseillaise poverty-stricken alleys,
+  picked it up joyously, turned&mdash;and with a delightful grace
+  kissed her finger-tips towards the ship.</P>
+
+  <P>Apparently we all of us had a few remaining French coins; and
+  certainly we were all grateful to the young Englishman for his
+  happy thought. The sous descended as fast as the woman could get
+  to where they fell. So numerous were they that she had no time to
+  express her gratitude except in broken snatches or gesture, in
+  interrupted attitudes of the most complete thanksgiving. The day
+  of miracles for her had come; and from the humble poverty that
+  valued tiny and infrequent splinters of wood she had suddenly
+  come into great wealth. Everybody was laughing, but in a very
+  kindly sort of way it seemed to me; and the very wharf rats and
+  gamins, wolfish and fierce in their everyday life of the
+  water-front, seemed to take a genuine pleasure in pointing out to
+  her the resting-place of those her dim old eyes had not seen.
+  Silver pieces followed. These were too wonderful. She grew more
+  and more excited, until several of the passengers leaning over
+  the rail began to murmur warningly, fearing harm. After picking
+  up each of these silver pieces, she bowed and gestured very
+  gracefully, waving both hands outward, lifting eyes and hands to
+  heaven, kissing her fingers, trying by every means in her power
+  to express the dazzling wonder and joy that this unexpected
+  marvel was bringing her. When she had done all these things many
+  times, she hugged herself ecstatically. A very well-dressed and
+  prosperous-looking Frenchman standing near seemed to be a little
+  afraid she might hug him. His fear had, perhaps, some grounds,
+  for she shook hands with everybody all around, and showed them
+  her wealth in her kerchief, explaining eagerly, the tears running
+  down her face.</P>
+
+  <P>Now the gang-plank was drawn aboard, and the band struck up
+  the usual lively air. At the first notes the old woman executed a
+  few feeble little jig steps in sheer exuberance. Then the
+  solemnity of the situation sobered her. Her great, wealthy,
+  powerful, kind friends were departing on their long voyage over
+  mysterious seas. Again and again, very earnestly, she repeated
+  the graceful, slow pantomime&mdash;the wave of the arms outward,
+  the eyes raised to heaven, the hands clasped finally over her
+  head. As the brown strip of water silently widened between us it
+  was strangely like a stage scene&mdash;the roofed sheds of the
+  quay, the motionless groups, the central figure of the old woman
+  depicting emotion.</P>
+
+  <P>Suddenly she dropped her hands and hobbled away at a great
+  rate, disappearing finally into the maze of the street beyond.
+  Concluding that she had decided to get quickly home with her
+  great treasure, we commended her discretion and gave our
+  attention to other things.</P>
+
+  <P>The drizzle fell uninterruptedly. We had edged sidewise the
+  requisite distance, and were now gathering headway in our long
+  voyage. The quail was beginning to recede and to diminish. Back
+  from the street hastened the figure of the little old woman. She
+  carried a large white cloth, of which she had evidently been in
+  quest. This she unfolded and waved vigorously with both hands.
+  Until we had passed quite from sight she stood there signalling
+  her farewell. Long after we were beyond distinguishing her figure
+  we could catch the flutter of white. Thus that ship's company,
+  embarking each on his Great Adventure, far from home and friends,
+  received their farewell, a very genuine farewell, from one poor
+  old woman. B. ventured the opinion that it was the best thing we
+  had bought with our French money.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='III' id="III"></A>
+
+  <H2>III.</H2>
+
+  <P>PORT SAID.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>The time of times to approach Port Said is just at the fall of
+  dusk. Then the sea lies in opalescent patches, and the low shores
+  fade away into the gathering night. The slanting masts and yards
+  of the dhows silhouette against a sky of the deepest translucent
+  green; and the heroic statue of De Lesseps, standing for ever at
+  the Gateway he opened, points always to the mysterious East.</P>
+
+  <P>The rhythmical, accustomed chug of the engines had fallen to
+  quarter speed, leaving an uncanny stillness throughout the ship.
+  Silently we slipped between the long piers, drew up on the
+  waterside town, seized the buoy, and came to rest. All around us
+  lay other ships of all sizes, motionless on the inky water. The
+  reflections from their lights seemed to be thrust into the
+  depths, like stilts; and the few lights from the town reflected
+  shiveringly across. Along the water-front all was dark and
+  silent. We caught the loom of buildings; and behind them a dull
+  glow as from a fire, and guessed tall minarets, and heard the
+  rising and falling of chanting. Numerous small boats hovered
+  near, floating in and out of the patches of light we ourselves
+  cast, waiting for permission to swarm at the gang-plank for our
+  patronage.</P>
+
+  <P>We went ashore, passed through a wicket gate, and across the
+  dark buildings to the heart of the town, whence came the dull
+  glow and the sounds of people.</P>
+
+  <P>Here were two streets running across one another, both
+  brilliantly lighted, both thronged, both lined with little shops.
+  In the latter one could buy anything, in any language, with any
+  money. In them we saw cheap straw hats made in Germany hung side
+  by side with gorgeous and beautiful stuffs from the Orient;
+  shoddy European garments and Eastern jewels; cheap celluloid
+  combs and curious embroideries. The crowd of passers-by in the
+  streets were compounded in the same curiously mixed fashion; a
+  few Europeans, generally in white, and then a variety of Arabs,
+  Egyptians, Somalis, Berbers, East Indians and the like, each in
+  his own gaudy or graceful costume. It speaks well for the
+  accuracy of feeling, anyway, of our various "Midways," "Pikes,"
+  and the like of our world's expositions that the streets of Port
+  Said looked like Midways raised to the nth power. Along them we
+  sauntered with a pleasing feeling of self-importance. On all
+  sides we were gently and humbly besought&mdash;by the
+  shopkeepers, by the sidewalk vendors, by would-be guides, by
+  fortune-tellers, by jugglers, by magicians; all soft-voiced and
+  respectful; all yielding as water to rebuff, but as quick as
+  water to glide back again. The vendors were of the colours of the
+  rainbow, and were heavily hung with long necklaces of coral or
+  amber, with scarves, with strings of silver coins, with sequinned
+  veils and silks, girt with many dirks and knives, furnished out
+  in concealed pockets with scarabs, bracelets, sandalwood boxes or
+  anything else under the broad canopy of heaven one might or might
+  not desire. Their voices were soft and pleasing, their eyes had
+  the beseeching quality of a good dog's, their anxious and
+  deprecating faces were ready at the slightest encouragement to
+  break out into the friendliest and most intimate of smiles.
+  Wherever we went we were accompanied by a retinue straight out of
+  the Arabian Nights, patiently awaiting the moment when we should
+  tire; should seek out the table of a sidewalk caf&eacute;; and
+  should, in our relaxed mood, be ready to unbend to our royal
+  purchases.</P>
+
+  <P>At that moment we were too much interested in the town itself.
+  The tiny shops, with their smiling and insinuating Oriental
+  keepers, were fascinating in their displays of carved woods,
+  jewellery, perfumes, silks, tapestries, silversmiths' work,
+  ostrich feathers, and the like. To either side the main street
+  lay long narrow dark alleys, in which flared single lights,
+  across which flitted mysterious long-robed figures, from which
+  floated stray snatches of music either palpitatingly barbaric or
+  ridiculously modern. There the authority of the straight,
+  soldierly-looking Soudanese policemen ceased, and it was not safe
+  to wander unarmed or alone.</P>
+
+  <P>Besides these motley variegations of the East and West, the
+  main feature of the town was the street car. It was an open-air
+  structure of spacious dimensions, as though benches and a canopy
+  had been erected rather haphazard on a small dancing platform.
+  The track is absurdly narrow in gauge; and as a consequence the
+  edifice swayed and swung from side to side. A single mule was
+  attached to it loosely by about ten feet of rope. It was driven
+  by a gaudy ragamuffin in a turban. Various other gaudy
+  ragamuffins lounged largely and picturesquely on the widely
+  spaced benches. Whence it came or whither it went I do not know.
+  Its orbit swung into the main street, turned a corner, and
+  disappeared. Apparently Europeans did not patronize this
+  picturesque wreck, but drove elegantly but mysteriously in small
+  open cabs conducted by totally incongruous turbaned drivers.</P>
+
+  <P>We ended finally at an imposing corner hotel, where we dined
+  by an open window just above the level of the street. A dozen
+  upturned faces besought us silently during the meal. At a glance
+  of even the mildest interest a dozen long brown arms thrust the
+  spoils of the East upon our consideration. With us sat a large
+  benign Swedish professor whose erudition was encyclopaedic, but
+  whose kindly humanity was greater. Uttering deep, cavernous
+  chuckles, the professor bargained. A red coral necklace for the
+  moment was the matter of interest. The professor inspected it
+  carefully, and handed it back.</P>
+
+  <P>"I doubt if id iss coral," said he simply.</P>
+
+  <P>The present owner of the beads went frantic with rapid-fire
+  proof and vociferation. With the swiftness and precision of much
+  repetition he fished out a match, struck it, applied the flame to
+  the alleged coral, and blew out the match; cast the necklace on
+  the pavement, produced mysteriously a small hammer, and with it
+  proceeded frantically to pound the beads. Evidently he was
+  accustomed to being doubted, and carried his materials for proof
+  around with him. Then, in one motion, the hammer disappeared, the
+  beads were snatched up, and again offered, unharmed, for
+  inspection.</P>
+
+  <P>"Are those good tests for genuineness?" we asked the
+  professor, aside.</P>
+
+  <P>"As to that," he replied regretfully, "I do not know. I know
+  of coral only that is the hard calcareous skeleton of the marine
+  coelenterate polyps; and that this red coral iss called of a
+  sclerobasic group; and other facts of the kind; but I do not know
+  if it iss supposed to resist impact and heat. Possibly," he ended
+  shrewdly, "it is the common imitation which does <I>not</I>
+  resist impact and heat. At any rate they are pretty. How much?"
+  he demanded of the vendor, a bright-eyed Egyptian waiting
+  patiently until our conference should cease.</P>
+
+  <P>"Twenty shillings," he replied promptly.</P>
+
+  <P>The professor shook with one of his cavernous chuckles.</P>
+
+  <P>"Too much," he observed, and handed the necklace back through
+  the window.</P>
+
+  <P>The Egyptian would by no means receive it.</P>
+
+  <P>"Keep! keep!" he implored, thrusting the mass of red upon the
+  professor with both hands. "How much you give?"</P>
+
+  <P>"One shilling," announced the professor firmly.</P>
+
+  <P>The coral necklace lay on the edge of the table throughout
+  most of our leisurely meal. The vendor argued, pleaded, gave it
+  up, disappeared in the crowd, returned dramatically after an
+  interval. The professor ate calmly, chuckled much, and from time
+  to time repeated firmly the words, "One shilling." Finally, at
+  the cheese, he reached out, swept the coral into his pocket, and
+  laid down two shillings. The Egyptian deftly gathered the coin,
+  smiled cheerfully, and produced a glittering veil, in which he
+  tried in vain to enlist Billy's interest.</P>
+
+  <P>For coffee and cigars we moved to the terrace outside. Here an
+  orchestra played, the peoples of many nations sat at little
+  tables, the peddlers, fakirs, jugglers, and fortune-tellers
+  swarmed. A half-dozen postal cards seemed sufficient to set a
+  small boy up in trade, and to imbue him with all the importance
+  and insistence of a merchant with jewels. Other ten-year-old
+  ragamuffins tried to call our attention to some sort of
+  sleight-of-hand with poor downy little chickens. Grave, turbaned,
+  and polite Indians squatted cross-legged at our feet, begging to
+  give us a look into the future by means of the only genuine
+  hall-marked Yogi-ism; a troupe of acrobats went energetically and
+  hopefully through quite a meritorious performance a few feet
+  away; a deftly triumphant juggler did very easily, and directly
+  beneath our watchful eyes, some really wonderful tricks. A
+  butterfly-gorgeous swarm of insinuating smiling peddlers of small
+  things dangled and spread their wares where they thought
+  themselves most sure of attention. Beyond our own little group we
+  saw slowly passing in the lighted street outside the portico the
+  variegated and picturesque loungers. Across the way a phonograph
+  bawled; our stringed orchestra played "The Dollar Princess;" from
+  somewhere over in the dark and mysterious alleyways came the
+  regular beating of a tom-tom. The magnificent and picturesque
+  town car with its gaudy ragamuffins swayed by in train of its
+  diminutive mule.</P>
+
+  <P>Suddenly our persistent and amusing <I>entourage</I> vanished
+  in all directions. Standing idly at the portico was a very
+  straight, black Soudanese. On his head was the usual red fez; his
+  clothing was of trim khaki; his knees and feet were bare, with
+  blue puttees between; and around his middle was drawn close and
+  smooth a blood-red sash at least a foot and a half in breadth. He
+  made a fine upstanding Egyptian figure, and was armed with pride,
+  a short sheathed club, and a great scorn. No word spoke he, nor
+  command; but merely jerked a thumb towards the darkness, and into
+  the darkness our many-hued horde melted away. We were left
+  feeling rather lonesome!</P>
+
+  <P>Near midnight we sauntered down the street to the quay, whence
+  we were rowed to the ship by another turbaned, long-robed figure,
+  who sweetly begged just a copper or so "for poor boatman."</P>
+
+  <P>We found the ship in the process of coaling, every porthole
+  and doorway closed, and heavy canvas hung to protect as far as
+  possible the clean decks. Two barges were moored alongside. Two
+  blazing braziers lighted them with weird red and flickering
+  flames. In their depths, cast in black and red shadows, toiled
+  half-guessed figures; from their depths, mounting a single steep
+  plank, came an unbroken procession of natives, naked save for a
+  wisp of cloth around the loins. They trod closely on each other's
+  heels, carrying each his basket atop his head or on one shoulder,
+  mounted a gang-plank, discharged their loads into the side of the
+  ship, and descended again to the depths by way of another plank.
+  The lights flickered across their dark faces, their gleaming
+  teeth and eyes. Somehow the work demanded a heap of screeching,
+  shouting, and gesticulation; but somehow also it went forward
+  rapidly. Dozens of unattached natives lounged about the gunwales
+  with apparently nothing to do but to look picturesque. Shore
+  boats moved into the narrow circle of light, drifted to our
+  gangway, and discharged huge crates of vegetables, sacks of
+  unknown stuffs, and returning passengers. A vigilant police boat
+  hovered near to settle disputes, generally with the blade of an
+  oar. For a long time we leaned over the rail watching them, and
+  the various reflected lights in the water, and the very clear,
+  unwavering stars. Then, the coaling finished, and the portholes
+  once more opened, we turned in.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='IV' id="IV"></A>
+
+  <H2>IV.</H2>
+
+  <P>SUEZ.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>Some time during the night we must have started, but so gently
+  had we slid along it fractional speed that until I raised my head
+  and looked out I had not realized the fact. I saw a high
+  sandbank. This glided monotonously by until I grew tired of
+  looking at it and got up.</P>
+
+  <P>After breakfast, however, I found that the sandbank had
+  various attractions all of its own. Three camels laden with stone
+  and in convoy of white-clad figures shuffled down the slope at a
+  picturesque angle. Two cowled women in black, veiled to the eyes
+  in gauze heavily sewn with sequins, barefooted, with massive
+  silver anklets, watched us pass. Hindu workmen in turban and
+  loin-cloth furnished a picturesque note, but did not seem to be
+  injuring themselves by over-exertion. Naked small boys raced us
+  for a short distance. The banks glided by very slowly and very
+  evenly, the wash sucked after us like water in a slough after a
+  duck boat, and the sky above the yellow sand looked extremely
+  blue.</P>
+
+  <P>At short and regular intervals, half-way up the miniature
+  sandhills, heavy piles or snubbing-posts had been planted. For
+  these we at first could guess no reason. Soon, however, we had to
+  pass another ship; and then we saw that one of us must tie up to
+  avoid being drawn irresistibly by suction into collision with the
+  other. The craft sidled by, separated by only a few feet, so that
+  we could look across to each other's decks and exchange
+  greetings. As the day grew this interest grew likewise. Dredgers
+  in the canal; rusty tramps flying unfamiliar flags of strange
+  tiny countries; big freighters, often with Greek or Turkish
+  characters on their sterns; small dirty steamers of suspicious
+  business; passenger ships like our own, returning from the
+  tropics, with white-clad, languid figures reclining in canvas
+  chairs; gunboats of this or that nation bound on mysterious
+  affairs; once a P. &amp; O. converted into a troopship, from
+  whose every available porthole, hatch, deck, and shroud laughing,
+  brown, English faces shouted chaff at our German decks&mdash;all
+  these either tied up for us, or were tied up for by us. The only
+  craft that received no consideration on our part were the various
+  picturesque Arab dhows, with their single masts and the long
+  yards slanting across them. Since these were very small, our
+  suction dragged at them cruelly. As a usual thing four vociferous
+  figures clung desperately to a rope passed around one of the
+  snubbing-posts ashore, while an old man shrieked syllables at
+  them from the dhow itself. As they never by any chance thought of
+  mooring her both stem and stern, the dhow generally changed ends
+  rapidly, shipping considerable water in the process. It must be
+  very trying to get so excited in a hot climate.</P>
+
+  <P>The high sandbanks of the early part of the day soon dropped
+  lower to afford us a wider view. In its broad, general features
+  the country was, quite simply, the desert of Arizona over again.
+  There were the same high, distant, and brittle-looking mountains,
+  fragile and pearly; the same low, broken half-distances; the same
+  wide sweeps; the same wonderful changing effects of light,
+  colour, shadow, and mirage; the same occasional strips of green
+  marking the watercourses and oases. As to smaller detail, we saw
+  many interesting divergences. In the foreground constantly
+  recurred the Bedouin brush shelters, each with its picturesque
+  figure or so in flowing robes, and its grumpy camels. Twice we
+  saw travelling caravans, exactly like the Bible pictures. At one
+  place a single burnoused Arab, leaning on his elbows, reclined
+  full length on the sky-line of a clean-cut sandhill. Glittering
+  in the mirage, half-guessed, half-seen, we made out distant
+  little white towns with slender palm trees. At places the water
+  from the canal had overflowed wide tracts of country. Here, along
+  the shore, we saw thousands of the water-fowl already familiar to
+  us, as well as such strangers as gaudy kingfishers, ibises, and
+  rosy flamingoes.</P>
+
+  <P>The canal itself seemed to be in a continual state of repair.
+  Dredgers were everywhere; some of the ordinary shovel type,
+  others working by suction, and discharging far inland by means of
+  weird huge pipes that apparently meandered at will over the face
+  of nature. The control stations were beautifully French and neat,
+  painted yellow, each with its gorgeous bougainvilleas in flower,
+  its square-rigged signal masts, its brightly painted extra buoys
+  standing in a row, its wharf&mdash;and its impassive Arab
+  fishermen thereon. We reclined in our canvas chairs, had lemon
+  squashes brought to us, and watched the entertainment steadily
+  and slowly unrolled before us.</P>
+
+  <P>We reached the end of the canal about three o'clock of the
+  afternoon, and dropped anchor off the low-lying shores. Our
+  binoculars showed us white houses in apparently single rank along
+  a far-reaching narrow sand spit, with sparse trees and a railroad
+  line. That was the town of Suez, and seemed so little interesting
+  that we were not particularly sorry that we could not go ashore.
+  Far in the distance were mountains; and the water all about us
+  was the light, clear green of the sky at sunset.</P>
+
+  <P>Innumerable dhows and row-boats swarmed down, filled with
+  eager salesmen of curios and ostrich plumes. They had not much
+  time in which to bargain, so they made it up in rapid-fire
+  vociferation. One very tall and dignified Arab had as sailor of
+  his craft the most extraordinary creature, just above the lower
+  limit of the human race. He was of a dull coal black, without a
+  single high light on him anywhere, as though he had been
+  sand-papered, had prominent teeth, like those of a baboon, in a
+  wrinkled, wizened monkey face, across which were three tattooed
+  bands, and possessed a little, long-armed, spare figure, bent and
+  wiry. He clambered up and down his mast, fetching things at his
+  master's behest; leapt nonchalantly for our rail or his own spar,
+  as the case might be, across the staggering abyss; clung so well
+  with his toes that he might almost have been classified with the
+  quadrumana; and between times squatted humped over on the rail,
+  watching us with bright, elfish, alien eyes.</P>
+
+  <P>At last the big German sailors bundled the whole variegated
+  horde overside. It was time to go, and our anchor chain was
+  already rumbling in the hawse pipes. They tumbled hastily into
+  their boats; and at once swarmed up their masts, whence they
+  feverishly continued their interrupted bargaining. In fact, so
+  fully embarked on the tides of commerce were they, that they
+  failed to notice the tides of nature widening between us. One old
+  man, in especial, at the very top of his mast, jerked hither and
+  thither by the sea, continued imploringly to offer an utterly
+  ridiculous carved wooden camel long after it was impossible to
+  have completed the transaction should anybody have been
+  moonstruck enough to have desired it. Our ship's prow swung; and
+  just at sunset, as the lights of Suez were twinkling out one by
+  one, we headed down the Red Sea.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='V' id="V"></A>
+
+  <H2>V.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE RED SEA.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>Suez is indeed the gateway to the East. In the Mediterranean
+  often the sea is rough, the winds cold, passengers are not yet
+  acquainted, and hug the saloons or the leeward side of the deck.
+  Once through the canal and all is changed by magic. The air is
+  hot and languid; the ship's company down to the very scullions
+  appear in immaculate white; the saloon chairs and transoms even
+  are put in white coverings; electric fans hum everywhere; the run
+  on lemon squashes begins; and many quaint and curious customs of
+  the tropics obtain.</P>
+
+  <P>For example: it is etiquette that before eight o'clock one may
+  wander the decks at will in one's pyjamas, converse affably with
+  fair ladies in pigtail and kimono, and be not abashed. But on the
+  stroke of eight bells it is also etiquette to disappear very
+  promptly and to array one's self for the day; and it is very
+  improper indeed to see or be seen after that hour in the rather
+  extreme <I>neglig&eacute;e</I> of the early morning. Also it
+  becomes the universal custom, or perhaps I should say the
+  necessity, to slumber for an hour after the noon meal. Certainly
+  sleep descending on the tropical traveller is armed with a
+  bludgeon. Passengers, crew, steerage, "deck," animal, and bird
+  fall down then in an enchantment. I have often wondered who
+  navigates the ship during that sacred hour, or, indeed, if
+  anybody navigates it at all. Perhaps that time is sacred to the
+  genii of the old East, who close all prying mortal eyes, but in
+  return lend a guiding hand to the most pressing of mortal
+  affairs. The deck of the ship is a curious sight between the
+  hours of half-past one and three. The tropical siesta requires no
+  couching of the form. You sit down in your chair, with a
+  book&mdash;you fade slowly into a deep, restful slumber. And yet
+  it is a slumber wherein certain small pleasant things persist
+  from the world outside. You remain dimly conscious of the
+  rhythmic throbbing of the engines, of the beat of soft, warm air
+  on your cheek.</P>
+
+  <P>At three o'clock or thereabout you rise as gently back to
+  life, and sit erect in your chair without a stretch or a yawn in
+  your whole anatomy. Then is the one time of day for a display of
+  energy&mdash;if you have any to display. Ship games,
+  walks&mdash;fairly brisk&mdash;explorations to the forecastle, a
+  watch for flying fish or Arab dhows, anything until tea-time.
+  Then the glowing sunset; the opalescent sea, and the soft
+  afterglow of the sky&mdash;and the bugle summoning you to dress.
+  That is a mean job. Nothing could possibly swelter worse than the
+  tiny cabin. The electric fan is an aggravation. You reappear in
+  your fresh "whites" somewhat warm and flustered in both mind and
+  body. A turn around the deck cools you off; and dinner restores
+  your equanimity&mdash;dinner with the soft, warm tropic air
+  breathing through all the wide-open ports; the electric fans
+  drumming busily; the men all in clean white; the ladies, the very
+  few precious ladies, in soft, low gowns. After dinner the deck,
+  as near cool as it will be, and heads bare to the breeze of our
+  progress, and glowing cigars. At ten or eleven o'clock the groups
+  begin to break up, the canvas chairs to empty. Soon reappears a
+  pyjamaed figure followed by a steward carrying a mattress. This
+  is spread, under its owner's direction, in a dark corner forward.
+  With a sigh you in your turn plunge down into the sweltering
+  inferno of your cabin, only to reappear likewise with a steward
+  and a mattress. The latter, if you are wise, you spread where the
+  wind of the ship's going will be full upon you. It is a strong
+  wind and blows upon you heavily, so that the sleeves and legs of
+  your pyjamas flop, but it is a soft, warm wind, and beats you as
+  with muffled fingers. In no temperate clime can you ever enjoy
+  this peculiar effect of a strong breeze on your naked skin
+  without even the faintest surface chilly sensation. So habituated
+  has one become to feeling cooler in a draught that the absence of
+  chill lends the night an unaccustomedness, the more weird in that
+  it is unanalyzed, so that one feels definitely that one is in a
+  strange, far country. This is intensified by the fact that in
+  these latitudes the moon, the great, glorious, calm tropical
+  moon, is directly overhead&mdash;follows the centre line of the
+  zenith&mdash;instead of being, as with us in our temperate zone,
+  always more or less declined to the horizon. This, too, lends the
+  night an exotic quality, the more effective in that at first the
+  reason for it is not apprehended.</P>
+
+  <P>A night in the tropics is always more or less broken. One
+  awakens, and sleeps again. Motionless white-clad figures,
+  cigarettes glowing, are lounging against the rail looking out
+  over a molten sea. The moonlight lies in patterns across the
+  deck, shivering slightly under the throb of the engines, or
+  occasionally swaying slowly forward or slowly back as the ship's
+  course changes, but otherwise motionless, for here the sea is
+  always calm. You raise your head, look about, sprawl in a new
+  position on your mattress, fall asleep. On one of these occasions
+  you find unexpectedly that the velvet-gray night has become
+  steel-gray dawn, and that the kindly old quartermaster is bending
+  over you. Sleepily, very sleepily, you stagger to your feet and
+  collapse into the nearest chair. Then to the swish of water, as
+  the sailors sluice the decks all around and under you, you fall
+  into a really deep sleep.</P>
+
+  <P>At six o'clock this is broken by chota-hazri, another tropical
+  institution, consisting merely of clear tea and biscuits. I never
+  could get to care for it, but nowhere in the tropics could I head
+  it off. No matter how tired I was or how dead sleepy, I had to
+  receive that confounded chota-hazri. Throwing things at the
+  native who brought it did no good at all. He merely dodged.
+  Admonition did no good, nor prohibition in strong terms. I was
+  but one white man of the whole white race; and I had no right to
+  possess idiosyncrasies running counter to dastur, the custom.
+  However, as the early hours are profitable hours in the tropics,
+  it did not drive me to homicide.</P>
+
+  <P>The ship's company now developed. Our two prize members,
+  fortunately for us, sat at our table. The first was the Swedish
+  professor aforementioned. He was large, benign, paternal, broad
+  in mind, thoroughly human and beloved, and yet profoundly
+  erudite. He was our iconoclast in the way of food; for he
+  performed small but illuminating dissections on his plate, and
+  announced triumphantly results that were not a bit in accordance
+  with the menu. A single bone was sufficient to take the
+  pretension out of any fish. Our other particular friend was C.,
+  with whom later we travelled in the interior of Africa. C. is a
+  very celebrated hunter and explorer, an old Africander, his face
+  seamed and tanned by many years in a hard climate. For several
+  days we did not recognize him, although he sat fairly alongside,
+  but put him down as a shy man, and let it go at that. He never
+  stayed for the long <I>table d'h&ocirc;te</I> dinners, but fell
+  upon the first solid course and made a complete meal from that.
+  When he had quite finished eating all he could, he drank all he
+  could; then he departed from the table, and took up a remote and
+  inaccessible position in the corner of the smoking-room. He was
+  engaged in growing the beard he customarily wore in the
+  jungle&mdash;a most fierce outstanding Mohammedan-looking beard
+  that terrified the intrusive into submission. And yet Bwana C.
+  possesses the kindest blue eyes in the world, full of quiet
+  patience, great understanding, and infinite gentleness. His
+  manner was abrupt and uncompromising, but he would do anything in
+  the world for one who stood in need of him. From women he fled;
+  yet Billy won him with infinite patience, and in the event they
+  became the closest of friends. Withal he possessed a pair of the
+  most powerful shoulders I have ever seen on a man of his frame;
+  and in the depths of his mild blue eyes flickered a flame of
+  resolution that I could well imagine flaring up to something
+  formidable. Slow to make friends, but staunch and loyal; gentle
+  and forbearing, but fierce and implacable in action; at once
+  loved and most terribly feared; shy as a wild animal, but
+  straightforward and undeviating in his human relations; most
+  remarkably quiet and unassuming, but with tremendous vital force
+  in his deep eyes and forward-thrust jaw; informed with the widest
+  and most understanding humanity, but unforgiving of evildoers;
+  and with the most direct and absolute courage, Bwana C. was to me
+  the most interesting man I met in Africa, and became the best of
+  my friends.</P>
+
+  <P>The only other man at our table happened to be, for our sins,
+  the young Englishman mentioned as throwing the first coin to the
+  old woman on the pier at Marseilles. We will call him Brown, and,
+  because he represents a type, he is worth looking upon for a
+  moment.</P>
+
+  <P>He was of the super-enthusiastic sort; bubbling over with
+  vitality, in and out of everything; bounding up at odd and
+  languid moments. To an extraordinary extent he was afflicted with
+  the spiritual blindness of his class. Quite genuinely, quite
+  seriously, he was unconscious of the human significance of beings
+  and institutions belonging to a foreign country or even to a
+  class other than his own. His own kind he treated as complete and
+  understandable human creatures. All others were merely objective.
+  As we, to a certain extent, happened to fall in the former
+  category, he was as pleasant to us as possible&mdash;that is, he
+  was pleasant to us in his way, but had not insight enough to
+  guess at how to be pleasant to us in our way. But as soon as he
+  got out of his own class, or what he conceived to be such, he
+  considered all people as "outsiders." He did not credit them with
+  prejudices to rub, with feelings to hurt, indeed hardly with ears
+  to overhear. Provided his subject was an "outsider," he had not
+  the slightest hesitancy in saying exactly what he thought about
+  any one, anywhere, always in his high clear English voice, no
+  matter what the time or occasion. As a natural corollary he
+  always rebuffed beggars and the like brutally, and was always
+  quite sublimely doing little things that thoroughly shocked our
+  sense of the other fellow's rights as a human being. In all this
+  he did not mean to be cruel or inconsiderate. It was just the way
+  he was built; and it never entered his head that "such people"
+  had ears and brains.</P>
+
+  <P>In the rest of the ship's company were a dozen or so other
+  Englishmen of the upper classes, either army men on shooting
+  trips, or youths going out with some idea of settling in the
+  country. They were a clean-built, pleasant lot; good people to
+  know anywhere, but of no unusual interest. It was only when one
+  went abroad into the other nations that inscribable human
+  interest could be found.</P>
+
+  <P>There was the Greek, Scutari, and his bride, a languorous
+  rather opulent beauty, with large dark eyes for all men, and a
+  luxurious manner of lying back and fanning herself. She talked,
+  soft-voiced, in half a dozen languages, changing from one to the
+  other without a break in either her fluency or her thought. Her
+  little lithe, active husband sat around and adored her. He was
+  apparently a very able citizen indeed, for he was going out to
+  take charge of the construction work on a German railway. To have
+  filched so important a job from the Germans themselves shows that
+  he must have had ability. With them were a middle-aged Holland
+  couple, engaged conscientiously in travelling over the globe.
+  They had been everywhere&mdash;the two American hemispheres, from
+  one Arctic Sea to another, Siberia, China, the Malay Archipelago,
+  this, that, and the other odd corner of the world. Always they
+  sat placidly side by side, either in the saloon or on deck,
+  smiling benignly, and conversing in spaced, comfortable syllables
+  with everybody who happened along. Mrs. Breemen worked
+  industriously on some kind of feminine gear, and explained to all
+  and sundry that she travelled "to see de sceenery wid my
+  hoos-band."</P>
+
+  <P>Also in this group was a small wiry German doctor, who had
+  lived for many years in the far interior of Africa, and was now
+  returning after his vacation. He was a little man, bright-eyed
+  and keen, with a clear complexion and hard flesh, in striking and
+  agreeable contrast to most of his compatriots. The latter were
+  trying to drink all the beer on the ship; but as she had been
+  stocked for an eighty-day voyage, of which this was but the
+  second week, they were not making noticeable headway. However,
+  they did not seem to be easily discouraged. The Herr Doktor was
+  most polite and attentive, but as we did not talk German nor much
+  Swahili, and he had neither English nor much French, we had our
+  difficulties. I have heard Billy in talking to him scatter
+  fragments of these four languages through a single sentence!</P>
+
+  <P>For several days we drifted down a warm flat sea. Then one
+  morning we came on deck to find ourselves close aboard a number
+  of volcanic islands. They were composed entirely of red and dark
+  purple lava blocks, rugged, quite without vegetation save for
+  occasional patches of stringy green in a gully; and uninhabited
+  except for a lighthouse on one, and a fishing shanty near the
+  shores of another. The high mournful mountains, with their dark
+  shadows, seemed to brood over hot desolation. The rusted and
+  battered stern of a wrecked steamer stuck up at an acute angle
+  from the surges. Shortly after we picked up the shores of
+  Arabia.</P>
+
+  <P>Note the advantages of a half ignorance. From early childhood
+  we had thought of Arabia as the "burning desert"&mdash;flat, of
+  course&mdash;and of the Red Sea as bordered by "shifting sands"
+  alone. If we had known the truth&mdash;if we had not been half
+  ignorant&mdash;we would have missed the profound surprise of
+  discovering that in reality the Red Sea is bordered by high and
+  rugged mountains, leaving just space enough between themselves
+  and the shore for a sloping plain on which our glasses could make
+  out occasional palms. Perhaps the "shifting sands of the burning
+  desert" lie somewhere beyond; but somebody might have mentioned
+  these great mountains! After examining them attentively we had to
+  confess that if this sort of thing continued farther north the
+  children of Israel must have had a very hard time of it. Mocha
+  shone white, glittering, and low, with the red and white spire of
+  a mosque rising brilliantly above it.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='VI' id="VI"></A>
+
+  <H2>VI.</H2>
+
+  <P>ADEN.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>It was cooler; and for a change we had turned into our bunks,
+  when B. pounded on our stateroom door.</P>
+
+  <P>"In the name of the Eternal East," said he, "come on
+  deck!"</P>
+
+  <P>We slipped on kimonos, and joined the row of scantily draped
+  and interested figures along the rail.</P>
+
+  <P>The ship lay quite still on a perfect sea of moonlight,
+  bordered by a low flat distant shore on one side, and nearer
+  mountains on the other. A strong flare, centred from two ship
+  reflectors overside, made a focus of illumination that subdued,
+  but could not quench, the soft moonlight with which all outside
+  was silvered. A dozen boats, striving against a current or
+  clinging as best they could to the ship's side, glided into the
+  light and became real and solid; or dropped back into the ghostly
+  white unsubstantiality of the moon. They were long, narrow boats,
+  with small flush decks fore and aft. We looked down on them from
+  almost directly above, so that we saw the thwarts and the ribs
+  and the things they contained.</P>
+
+  <P>Astern in each stood men, bending gracefully against the
+  thrust of long sweeps. About their waists were squares of cloth,
+  wrapped twice and tucked in. Otherwise they were naked, and the
+  long smooth muscles of their slender bodies rippled under the
+  skin. The latter was of a beautiful fine texture, and chocolate
+  brown. These men had keen, intelligent, clear-cut faces, of the
+  Greek order, as though the statues of a garden had been stained
+  brown and had come to life. They leaned on their sweeps,
+  thrusting slowly but strongly against the little wind and current
+  that would drift them back.</P>
+
+  <P>In the body of the boats crouched, sat, or lay a picturesque
+  mob. Some pulled spasmodically on the very long limber oars;
+  others squatted doing nothing; some, huddled shapelessly
+  underneath white cloths that completely covered them, slept
+  soundly in the bottom. We took these for merchandise until one of
+  them suddenly threw aside his covering and sat up. Others, again,
+  poised in proud and graceful attitudes on the extreme prows of
+  their bobbing craft. Especially decorative were two, clad only in
+  immense white turbans and white cloths about the waist. An old
+  Arab with a white beard stood midships in one boat, quite
+  motionless, except for the slight swaying necessary to preserve
+  his equilibrium, his voluminous white draperies fluttering in the
+  wind, his dark face just distinguishable under his burnouse. Most
+  of the men were Somalis, however. Their keen small faces, slender
+  but graceful necks, slim, well-formed torsos bending to every
+  movement of the boat, and the white or gaudy draped nether
+  garments were as decorative as the figures on an Egyptian tomb.
+  One or two of the more barbaric had made neat headdresses of
+  white clay plastered in the form of a skull-cap.</P>
+
+  <P>After an interval a small and fussy tugboat steamed around our
+  stern and drew alongside the gangway. Three passengers
+  disembarked from her and made their way aboard. The main deck of
+  the craft under an awning was heavily encumbered with trunks, tin
+  boxes, hand baggage, tin bath-tubs, gun cases, and all sorts of
+  impedimenta. The tugboat moored itself to us fore and aft, and
+  proceeded to think about discharging. Perhaps twenty men in
+  accurate replica of those in the small boats had charge of the
+  job. They had their own methods. After a long interval devoted
+  strictly to nothing, some unfathomable impulse would incite one
+  or two or three of the natives to tackle a trunk. At it they
+  tugged and heaved and pushed in the manner of ants making off
+  with a particularly large fly or other treasure trove, tossing it
+  up the steep gangway to the level of our decks. The trunks once
+  safely bestowed, all interest, all industry, died. We thought
+  that finished it, and wondered why the tug did not pull out of
+  the way. But always, after an interval, another bright idea would
+  strike another native or natives. He&mdash;or they&mdash;would
+  disappear beneath the canvas awning over the tug's deck, to
+  emerge shortly, carrying almost anything, from a parasol to a
+  heavy chest.</P>
+
+  <P>On close inspection they proved to be a very small people. The
+  impression of graceful height had come from the slenderness and
+  justness of their proportions, the smallness of their bones, and
+  the upright grace of their carriage. After standing alongside
+  one, we acquired a fine respect for their ability to handle those
+  trunks at all.</P>
+
+  <P>Moored to the other side of the ship we found two huge
+  lighters, from which bales of goods were being hoisted aboard.
+  Two camels and a dozen diminutive mules stood in the waist of one
+  of these craft. The camels were as sniffy and supercilious and
+  scornful as camels always are; and everybody promptly hated them
+  with the hatred of the abysmally inferior spirit for something
+  that scorns it, as is the usual attitude of the human mind
+  towards camels. We waited for upwards of an hour, in the hope of
+  seeing those camels hoisted aboard; but in vain. While we were so
+  waiting one of the deck passengers below us, a Somali in white
+  clothes and a gorgeous cerise turban, decided to turn in. He
+  spread a square of thin matting atop one of the hatches, and
+  began to unwind yards and yards of the fine silk turban. He came
+  to the end of it&mdash;whisk! he sank to the deck; the turban,
+  spread open by the resistance of the air, fluttered down to cover
+  him from head to foot. Apparently he fell asleep at once, for he
+  did not again move nor alter his position. He, as well as an
+  astonishingly large proportion of the other Somalis and
+  Abyssinians we saw, carried a queer, well-defined, triangular
+  wound in his head. It had long since healed, was an inch or so
+  across, and looked as though a piece of the skull had been
+  removed. If a conscientious enemy had leisure and an icepick he
+  would do just about that sort of a job. How its recipient had
+  escaped instant death is a mystery.</P>
+
+  <P>At length, about three o'clock, despairing of the camels, we
+  turned in.</P>
+
+  <P>After three hours' sleep we were again on deck. Aden by
+  daylight seemed to be several sections of a town tucked into
+  pockets in bold, raw, lava mountains that came down fairly to the
+  water's edge. Between these pockets ran a narrow shore road; and
+  along the road paced haughty camels hitched to diminutive carts.
+  On contracted round bluffs towards the sea were various low
+  bungalow buildings which, we were informed, comprised the
+  military and civil officers' quarters. The real Aden has been
+  built inland a short distance at the bottom of a cup in the
+  mountains. Elaborate stone reservoirs have been constructed to
+  catch rain water, as there is no other natural water supply
+  whatever. The only difficulty is that it practically never rains;
+  so the reservoirs stand empty, the water is distilled from the
+  sea, and the haughty camels and the little carts do the
+  distributing.</P>
+
+  <P>The lava mountains occupy one side of the spacious bay or
+  gulf. The foot of the bay and the other side are flat, with one
+  or two very distant white villages, and many heaps of glittering
+  salt as big as houses.</P>
+
+  <P>We waited patiently at the rail for an hour more to see the
+  camels slung aboard by the crane. It was worth the wait. They
+  lost their impassive and immemorial dignity completely,
+  sprawling, groaning, positively shrieking in dismay. When the
+  solid deck rose to them, and the sling had been loosened,
+  however, they regained their poise instantaneously. Their noses
+  went up in the air, and they looked about them with a
+  challenging, unsmiling superiority, as though to dare any one of
+  us to laugh. Their native attendants immediately squatted down in
+  front of them, and began to feed them with convenient lengths of
+  what looked like our common marsh cat-tails. The camels did not
+  even then manifest the slightest interest in the proceedings.
+  Indeed, they would not condescend to reach out three inches for
+  the most luscious tit-bit held that far from their aristocratic
+  noses. The attendants had actually to thrust the fodder between
+  their jaws. I am glad to say they condescended to chew.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='VII' id="VII"></A>
+
+  <H2>VII.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE INDIAN OCEAN.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>Leaving Aden, and rounding the great promontory of Cape
+  Guardafui, we turned south along the coast of Africa. Off the
+  cape were strange, oily cross rips and currents on the surface of
+  the sea; the flying-fish rose in flocks before our bows; high
+  mountains of peaks and flat table tops thrust their summits into
+  clouds; and along the coast the breakers spouted like whales. For
+  the first time, too, we began to experience what our
+  preconceptions had imagined as tropical heat. Heretofore we had
+  been hot enough, in all conscience, but the air had felt as
+  though wafted from an opened furnace door&mdash;dry and
+  scorching. Now, although the temperature was lower,<A name=
+  'FNanchor_2_2' id="FNanchor_2_2"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_2_2'><SUP>[2]</SUP></A> the humidity was greater. A
+  swooning languor was abroad over the spellbound ocean, a relaxing
+  mist of enchantment.</P>
+
+  <P>My glasses were constantly clouding over with a fine coating
+  of water drops; exposed metal rusted overnight; the folds in
+  garments accumulated mildew in an astonishingly brief period of
+  time. There was never even the suggestion of chill in this
+  dampness. It clung and enveloped like a grateful garment; and
+  seemed only to lack sweet perfume.</P>
+
+  <P>At this time, by good fortune, it happened that the moon came
+  full. We had enjoyed its waxing during our voyage down the Red
+  Sea; but now it had reached its greatest phase, and hung over the
+  slumbering tropic ocean like a lantern. The lazy sea stirred
+  beneath it, and the ship glided on, its lights fairly subdued by
+  the splendour of the waters. Under the awnings the ship's company
+  lounged in lazy attitudes or promenaded slowly, talking low
+  voiced, cigars glowing in the splendid dusk. Overside, in the
+  furrow of the disturbed waters, the phosphorescence flashed
+  perpetually beneath the shadow of the ship.</P>
+
+  <P>The days passed by languidly and all alike. On the chart
+  outside the smoking-room door the procession of tiny German flags
+  on pins marched steadily, an inch at a time, towards the south.
+  Otherwise we might as well have imagined ourselves midgets afloat
+  in a pond and getting nowhere.</P>
+
+  <P>Somewhere north of the equator&mdash;before Father Neptune in
+  ancient style had come aboard and ducked the lot of us&mdash;we
+  were treated to the spectacle of how the German "sheep" reacts
+  under a joke. Each nation has its type of fool; and all, for the
+  joyousness of mankind, differ. On the bulletin board one evening
+  appeared a notice to the effect that the following morning a
+  limited number of sportsmen would be permitted ashore for the
+  day. Each was advised to bring his own lunch, rifle, and drinks.
+  The reason alleged was that the ship must round a certain cape
+  across which the sportsmen could march afoot in sufficient time
+  to permit them a little shooting.</P>
+
+  <P>Now aboard ship were a dozen English, four Americans, and
+  thirty or forty Germans. The Americans and English looked upon
+  that bulletin, smiled gently, and went to order another round of
+  lemon squashes. It was a meek, mild, little joke enough; but
+  surely the bulletin board was as far as it could possibly go.
+  Next morning, however, we observed a half-dozen of our German
+  friends in khaki and sun helmet, very busy with lunch boxes,
+  bottles of beer, rifles, and the like. They said they were going
+  ashore as per bulletin. We looked at each other and hied us to
+  the upper deck. There we found one of the boats slung overside,
+  with our old friend the quartermaster ostentatiously stowing kegs
+  of water, boxes, and the like.</P>
+
+  <P>"When," we inquired gently, "does the expedition start?"</P>
+
+  <P>"At ten o'clock," said he.</P>
+
+  <P>It was now within fifteen minutes of that hour.</P>
+
+  <P>We were at the time fully ten miles off shore, and forging
+  ahead full speed parallel with the coast.</P>
+
+  <P>We pointed out this fact to the quartermaster, but found, to
+  our sorrow, that the poor old man had suddenly gone deaf! We
+  therefore refrained from asking several other questions that had
+  occurred to us&mdash;such as, why the cape was not shown on the
+  map.</P>
+
+  <P>"Somebody," said one of the Americans, a cowboy going out
+  second class on the look for new cattle country, "is a goat. It
+  sure looks to me like it was these yere steamboat people. They
+  can't expect to rope nothing on such a raw deal as this!"</P>
+
+  <P>To which the English assented, though in different idiom.</P>
+
+  <P>But now up the companion ladder struggled eight serious-minded
+  individuals herded by the second mate. They were armed to the
+  teeth, and thoroughly equipped with things I had seen in German
+  catalogues, but in whose existence I had never believed. A
+  half-dozen sailors eagerly helped them with their multitudinous
+  effects. Not a thought gave they to the fact that we were ten
+  miles off the coast, that we gave no indication of slackening
+  speed, that it would take the rest of the day to row ashore, that
+  there was no cape for us to round, that if there were&mdash;oh!
+  all the other hundred improbabilities peculiar to the situation.
+  Under direction of the mate they deposited their impedimenta
+  beneath a tarpaulin, and took their places in solemn rows
+  amidships across the thwarts of the boat slung overside. The
+  importance of the occasion sat upon them heavily; they were going
+  ashore&mdash;in Africa&mdash;to Slay Wild Beasts. They looked
+  upon themselves as of bolder, sterner stuff than the rest of
+  us.</P>
+
+  <P>When the procession first appeared, our cowboy's face for a
+  single instant had flamed with amazed incredulity. Then a mask of
+  expressionless stolidity fell across his features, which in no
+  line thereafter varied one iota.</P>
+
+  <P>"What are they going to do with them?" murmured one of the
+  Englishmen, at a loss.</P>
+
+  <P>"I reckon," said the cowboy, "that they look on this as the
+  easiest way to drown them all to onct."</P>
+
+  <P>Then from behind one of the other boats suddenly appeared a
+  huge German sailor with a hose. The devoted imbeciles in the
+  shore boat were drenched as by a cloud-burst. Back and forth and
+  up and down the heavy stream played, while every other human
+  being about the ship shrieked with joy. Did the victims rise up
+  in a body and capture that hose nozzle and turn the stream to
+  sweep the decks? Did they duck for shelter? Did they at least
+  know enough to scatter and run? They did none of these things;
+  but sat there in meek little rows like mannikins until the boat
+  was half full of water and everything awash. Then, when the
+  sailor shut off the stream, they continued to sit there until the
+  mate came to order them out. Why? I cannot tell you. Perhaps that
+  is the German idea of how to take a joke. Perhaps they were
+  afraid worse things might be consequent on resistance. Perhaps
+  they still hoped to go ashore. One of the Englishmen asked just
+  that question.</P>
+
+  <P>"What," he demanded disgustedly, "what is the matter with the
+  beggars?"</P>
+
+  <P>Our cowboy may have had the correct solution. He stretched his
+  long legs and jumped down from the rail.</P>
+
+  <P>"Nothing stirring above the ears," said he.</P>
+
+  <P>It is customary in books of travel to describe this part of
+  the journey somewhat as follows: "Skirting the low and
+  uninteresting shores of Africa we at length reached," etc. Low
+  and uninteresting shores! Through the glasses we made out distant
+  mountains far beyond nearer hills. The latter were green-covered
+  with dense forests whence rose mysterious smokes. Along the shore
+  we saw an occasional cocoanut plantation to the water's edge and
+  native huts and villages of thatch. Canoes of strange models lay
+  drawn up on shelving beaches; queer fish-pounds of brush reached
+  out considerable distances from the coast. The white surf pounded
+  on a yellow beach.</P>
+
+  <P>All about these things was the jungle, hemming in the
+  plantations and villages, bordering the lagoons, creeping down
+  until it fairly overhung the yellow beaches; as though, conqueror
+  through all the country beyond, it were half-inclined to dispute
+  dominion with old Ocean himself. It looked from the distance like
+  a thick, soft coverlet thrown down over the country;
+  following&mdash;or, rather, suggesting&mdash;the inequalities.
+  Through the glasses we were occasionally able to peep under the
+  edge of this coverlet, and see where the fringe of the jungle
+  drew back in a little pocket, or to catch the sheen of mysterious
+  dark rivers slipping to the sea. Up these dark rivers, by way of
+  the entrances of these tiny pockets, the imagination then could
+  lead on into the dimness beneath the sunlit upper surfaces.</P>
+
+  <P>Towards the close of one afternoon we changed our course
+  slightly, and swung in on a long slant towards the coast. We did
+  it casually; too casually for so very important an action, for
+  now at last we were about to touch the mysterious continent. Then
+  we saw clearer the fine, big groves of palm and the luxuriance of
+  the tropical vegetation. Against the greenery, bold and white,
+  shone the buildings of Mombasa; and after a little while we saw
+  an inland glitter that represented her narrow, deep bay, the
+  stern of a wreck against the low, green cliffs, and strange,
+  fat-trunked squat trees without leaves. Straight past all this we
+  glided at half speed, then turned sharp to the right to enter a
+  long wide expanse like a river, with green banks, twenty feet or
+  so in height, grown thickly with the tall cocoanut palms. These
+  gave way at times into broad, low lagoons, at the end of which
+  were small beaches and boats, and native huts among more cocoanut
+  groves. Through our glasses we could see the black men watching
+  us, quite motionless, squatted on their heels.</P>
+
+  <P>It was like suddenly entering another world, this gliding from
+  the open sea straight into the heart of a green land. The
+  ceaseless wash of waves we had left outside with the ocean; our
+  engines had fallen silent. Across the hushed waters came to us
+  strange chantings and the beating of a tom-tom, an occasional
+  shrill shout from the unknown jungle. The sun was just set, and
+  the tops of the palms caught the last rays; all below was dense
+  green shadow. Across the surface of the water glided dug-out
+  canoes of shapes strange to us. We passed ancient ruins almost
+  completely dismantled, their stones half smothered in green rank
+  growth. The wide river-like bay stretched on before us as far as
+  the waning light permitted us to see; finally losing itself in
+  the heart of mystery.</P>
+
+  <P>Steadily and confidently our ship steamed forward, until at
+  last, when we seemed to be afloat in a land-locked lake, we
+  dropped anchor and came to rest.</P>
+
+  <P>Darkness fell utterly before the usual quarantine regulations
+  had been carried through. Active and efficient agents had already
+  taken charge of our affairs, so we had only to wait idly by the
+  rail until summoned. Then we jostled our way down the long
+  gangway, passed and repassed by natives carrying baggage or
+  returning for more baggage, stepped briskly aboard a very bobby
+  little craft, clambered over a huge pile of baggage, and stowed
+  ourselves as best we could. A figure in a long white robe sat
+  astern, tiller ropes in hand; two half-naked blacks far up
+  towards the prow manipulated a pair of tremendous sweeps. With a
+  vast heaving, jabbering, and shouting, our boat disengaged itself
+  from the swarm of other craft. We floated around the stern of our
+  ship, and were immediately suspended in blackness dotted with the
+  stars and their reflections, and with various twinkling scattered
+  lights. To one of these we steered, and presently touched at a
+  stone quay with steps. At last we set foot on the land to which
+  so long we had journeyed and towards which our expectations had
+  grown so great. We experienced "the pleasure that touches the
+  souls of men landing on strange shores."</P>
+
+  <P>FOOTNOTES:</P><A name='Footnote_2_2' id=
+  "Footnote_2_2"></A><A href='#FNanchor_2_2'>[2]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>82-88&deg; degrees in daytime, and 75-83&deg; degrees at
+    night.</P>
+  </DIV>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='VIII' id="VIII"></A>
+
+  <H2>VIII.</H2>
+
+  <P>MOMBASA.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>A single light shone at the end of the stone quay, and another
+  inside a big indeterminate building at some distance. We stumbled
+  towards this, and found it to be the biggest shed ever
+  constructed out of corrugated iron. A bearded Sikh stood on guard
+  at its open entrance. He let any one and every one enter, with
+  never a flicker of his expressionless black eyes; but allowed no
+  one to go out again without the closest scrutiny for dutiable
+  articles that lacked the blue customs plaster. We entered. The
+  place was vast and barnlike and dim, and very, very hot. A
+  half-dozen East Indians stood behind the counters; another, a
+  babu, sat at a little desk ready to give his clerical attention
+  to what might be required. We saw no European; but next morning
+  found that one passed his daylight hours in this inferno of heat.
+  For the moment we let our main baggage go, and occupied ourselves
+  only with getting through our smaller effects. This accomplished,
+  we stepped out past the Sikh into the grateful night.</P>
+
+  <P>We had as guide a slender and wiry individual clad in tarboush
+  and long white robe. In a vague, general way we knew that the
+  town of Mombasa was across the island and about four miles
+  distant. In what direction or how we got there we had not the
+  remotest idea.</P>
+
+  <P>The guide set off at a brisk pace with which we tried in vain
+  to keep step. He knew the ground, and we did not; and the night
+  was black dark. Commands to stop were of no avail whatever; nor
+  could we get hold of him to restrain him by force. When we put on
+  speed he put on speed too. His white robe glimmered ahead of us
+  just in sight; and in the darkness other white robes, passing and
+  crossing, glimmered also. At first the ground was rough, so that
+  we stumbled outrageously. Billy and B. soon fell behind, and I
+  heard their voices calling plaintively for us to slow down a
+  bit.</P>
+
+  <P>"If I ever lose this nigger, I'll never find him again," I
+  shouted back, "but I can find you. Do the best you can!"</P>
+
+  <P>We struck a smoother road that led up a hill on a long slant.
+  Apparently for miles we followed thus, the white-robed individual
+  ahead still deaf to all commands and the blood-curdling threats I
+  had now come to uttering. All our personal baggage had long since
+  mysteriously disappeared, ravished away from us at the customs
+  house by a ragged horde of blacks. It began to look as though we
+  were stranded in Africa without baggage or effects. Billy and B.
+  were all the time growing fainter in the distance, though
+  evidently they too had struck the long, slanting road.</P>
+
+  <P>Then we came to a dim, solitary lantern glowing feebly beside
+  a bench at what appeared to be the top of the hill. Here our
+  guide at last came to a halt and turned to me a grinning
+  face.</P>
+
+  <P>"Samama hapa," he observed.</P>
+
+  <P>There! That was the word I had been frantically searching my
+  memory for! Samama&mdash;stop!</P>
+
+  <P>The others struggled in. We were very warm. Up to the bench
+  led a tiny car track, the rails not over two feet apart, like the
+  toy railroads children use. This did not look much like grownup
+  transportation, but it and the bench and the dim lantern
+  represented all the visible world.</P>
+
+  <P>We sat philosophically on the bench and enjoyed the soft
+  tropical night. The air was tepid, heavy with unknown perfume,
+  black as a band of velvet across the eyes, musical with the
+  subdued undertones of a thousand thousand night insects. At
+  points overhead the soft blind darkness melted imperceptibly into
+  stars.</P>
+
+  <P>After a long interval we distinguished a distant faint
+  rattling, that each moment increased in loudness. Shortly came
+  into view along the narrow tracks a most extraordinary vehicle.
+  It was a small square platform on wheels, across which ran a
+  bench seat, and over which spread a canopy. It carried also a dim
+  lantern. This rumbled up to us and stopped. From its stern hopped
+  two black boys. Obeying a smiling invitation, we took our places
+  on the bench. The two boys immediately set to pushing us along
+  the narrow track.</P>
+
+  <P>We were off at an astonishing speed through the darkness. The
+  night was deliciously tepid; and, as I have said, absolutely
+  dark. We made out the tops of palms and the dim loom of great
+  spreading trees, and could smell sweet, soft odours. The
+  bare-headed, lightly-clad boys pattered alongside whenever the
+  grade was easy, one hand resting against the rail; or pushed
+  mightily up little hills; or clung alongside like monkeys while
+  we rattled and swooped and plunged down hill into the darkness.
+  Subsequently we learned that a huge flat beam projecting
+  amidships from beneath the seat operated a brake which we above
+  were supposed to manipulate; but being quite ignorant as to the
+  ethics and mechanics of this strange street-car system, we swung
+  and swayed at times quite breathlessly.</P>
+
+  <P>After about fifteen minutes we began to pick up lights ahead,
+  then to pass dimly-seen garden walls with trees whose brilliant
+  flowers the lantern revealed fitfully. At last we made out white
+  stucco houses, and shortly drew up with a flourish before the
+  hotel itself.</P>
+
+  <P>This was a two-story stucco affair, with deep verandas sunken
+  in at each story. It fronted a wide white street facing a public
+  garden; and this, we subsequently discovered, was about the only
+  clear and open space in all the narrow town. Antelope horns were
+  everywhere hung on the walls; and teakwood easy-chairs, with
+  rests on which comfortably to elevate your feet above your head,
+  stood all about. We entered a bare, brick-floored dining-room,
+  and partook of tropical fruits quite new to us&mdash;papayes,
+  mangoes, custard apples, pawpaws, and the small red eating
+  bananas too delicate for export. Overhead the punkahs swung back
+  and forth in lazy hypnotic rhythm. We could see the two blacks at
+  the ends of the punkah cords outside on the veranda, their bodies
+  swaying lithely in alternation as they threw their weight against
+  the light ropes. Other blacks, in the long white robes and
+  exquisitely worked white skull caps of the Swahili, glided
+  noiselessly on bare feet, serving.</P>
+
+  <P>After dinner we sat out until midnight in the teakwood chairs
+  of the upper gallery, staring through the arches into the black,
+  mysterious night, for it was very hot, and we rather dreaded the
+  necessary mosquito veils as likely to prove stuffy. The
+  mosquitoes are few in Mombasa, but they are very
+  deadly&mdash;very. At midnight the thermometer stood 87&deg;
+  F.</P>
+
+  <P>Our premonitions as to stuffiness were well justified. After a
+  restless night we came awake at daylight to the sound of a fine
+  row of some sort going on outside in the streets. Immediately we
+  arose, threw aside the lattices, and hung out over the sill.</P>
+
+  <P>The chalk-white road stretched before us. Opposite was a
+  public square, grown with brilliant flowers, and flowering trees.
+  We could not doubt the cause of the trouble. An Indian on a
+  bicycle, hurrying to his office, had knocked down a native child.
+  Said child, quite naked, sat in the middle of the white dust and
+  howled to rend the heavens&mdash;whenever he felt himself
+  observed. If, however, the attention of the crowd happened for
+  the moment to be engrossed with the babu, the injured one sat up
+  straight and watched the row with interested, rolling, pickaninny
+  eyes. A native policeman made the centre of a whirling,
+  vociferating group. He was a fine-looking chap, straight and
+  soldierly, dressed in red tarboosh, khaki coat bound close around
+  the waist by yards and yards of broad red webbing, loose, short
+  drawers of khaki, bare knees and feet, and blue puttees between.
+  His manner was inflexible. The babu jabbered excitedly; telling,
+  in all probability, how he was innocent of fault, was late for
+  his work, etc. In vain. He had to go; also the kid, who now,
+  seeing himself again an object of interest, recommenced his
+  howling. Then the babu began frantically to indicate members of
+  the crowd whom he desired to retain as witnesses. Evidently not
+  pleased with the prospect of appearing in court, those indicated
+  promptly ducked and ran. The policeman as promptly pursued and
+  collared them one by one. He was a long-legged policeman, and he
+  ran well. The moment he laid hands on a fugitive, the latter
+  collapsed; whereupon the policeman dropped him and took after
+  another. The joke of it was that the one so abandoned did not try
+  again to make off, but stayed as though he had been tagged at
+  some game. Finally the whole lot, still vociferating, moved off
+  down the white road.</P>
+
+  <P>For over an hour we hung from our window sill, thoroughly
+  interested and amused by the varied life that deployed before our
+  eyes. The morning seemed deliciously cool after the hot night,
+  although the thermometer stood high. The sky was very blue, with
+  big piled white clouds down near the horizon. Dazzling sun shone
+  on the white road, the white buildings visible up and down the
+  street, the white walls enclosing their gardens, and the greenery
+  and colours of the trees within them. For from what we could see
+  from our window we immediately voted tropical vegetation quite up
+  to advertisement: whole trees of gaudy red or yellow or bright
+  orange blossoms, flowering vines, flowering shrubs, peered over
+  the walls or through the fences; and behind them rose great
+  mangoes or the slenderer shafts of bananas and cocoanut
+  palms.</P>
+
+  <P>Up and down wandered groups of various sorts of natives. A
+  month later we would have been able to identify their different
+  tribes and to know more about them; but now we wondered at them,
+  as strange and picturesque peoples. They impressed us in general
+  as being a fine lot of men, for they were of good physique,
+  carried themselves well, and looked about them with a certain
+  dignity and independence, a fine free pride of carriage and of
+  step. This fact alone differentiated them from our own negroes;
+  but, further, their features were in general much finer, and
+  their skins of a clear mahogany beautiful in its satiny texture.
+  Most&mdash;and these were the blackest&mdash;wore long white
+  robes and fine openwork skull caps. They were the local race, the
+  Swahili, had we but known it; the original "Zanzibari" who
+  furnished Livingstone, Stanley, Speke, and the other early
+  explorers with their men. Others, however, were much less
+  "civilized." We saw one "Cook's tour from the jungle" consisting
+  of six savages, their hair twisted into innumerable points, their
+  ear lobes stretched to hang fairly to their shoulders, wearing
+  only a rather neglectful blanket, adorned with polished wire,
+  carrying war clubs and bright spears. They followed, with eyes
+  and mouths open, a very sophisticated-looking city cousin in the
+  usual white garments, swinging a jaunty, light bamboo cane. The
+  cane seems to be a distinguishing mark of the leisured class. It
+  not only means that you are not working, but also that you have
+  no earthly desire to work.</P>
+
+  <P>About this time one of the hotel boys brought the inevitable
+  chota-hazri&mdash;the tea and biscuits of early morning. For this
+  once it was very welcome.</P>
+
+  <P>Our hotel proved to be on the direct line of freighting. There
+  are no horses or draught animals in Mombasa; the fly is too
+  deadly. Therefore all hauling is done by hand. The tiny tracks of
+  the unique street car system run everywhere any one would wish to
+  go; branching off even into private grounds and to the very front
+  doors of bungalows situated far out of town. Each resident owns
+  his own street car, just as elsewhere a man has his own carriage.
+  There are, of course, public cars also, each with its pair of
+  boys to push it; and also a number of rather decrepit rickshaws.
+  As a natural corollary to the passenger traffic, the freighting
+  also is handled by the blacks on large flat trucks with short
+  guiding poles. These men are quite naked save for a small loin
+  cloth; are beautifully shaped; and glisten all over with
+  perspiration shining in the sun. So fine is the texture of their
+  skins, the softness of their colour&mdash;so rippling the play of
+  muscles&mdash;that this shining perspiration is like a beautiful
+  polish. They rush from behind, slowly and steadily, and patiently
+  and unwaveringly, the most tremendous loads of the heaviest
+  stuffs. When the hill becomes too steep for them, they turn their
+  backs against the truck; and by placing one foot behind the
+  other, a few inches at a time, they edge their burden up the
+  slope.</P>
+
+  <P>The steering is done by one man at the pole or tongue in
+  front. This individual also sets the key to the song by which in
+  Africa all heavy labour is carried forward. He cries his wavering
+  shrill-voiced chant; the toilers utter antiphony in low gruff
+  tones. At a distance one hears only the wild high syncopated
+  chanting; but as the affair draws slowly nearer, he catches the
+  undertone of the responses. These latter are cast in the regular
+  swing and rhythm of effort; but the steersman throws in his bit
+  at odd and irregular intervals. Thus:</P>
+
+  <P>Headman (shrill): "Hay, ah mon!"</P>
+
+  <P>Pushers (gruff in rhythm):
+  "Tunk!&mdash;tunk!&mdash;tunk!&mdash;" or:</P>
+
+  <P>Headman (and wavering minor chant):
+  "Ah&mdash;nah&mdash;nee&mdash;e-e-e!"</P>
+
+  <P>Pushers (undertone): "Umbwa&mdash;jo-e!
+  Um-bwa&mdash;jo&mdash;e!"</P>
+
+  <P>These wild and barbaric chantings&mdash;in the distance; near
+  at hand; dying into distance again&mdash;slow, dogged, toilsome,
+  came to be to us one of the typical features of the place.</P>
+
+  <P>After breakfast we put on our sun helmets and went forth
+  curiously to view the town. We found it roughly divided into four
+  quarters&mdash;the old Portuguese, the Arabic, the European, and
+  the native. The Portuguese comprises the outer fringe next the
+  water-front of the inner bay. It is very narrow of street, with
+  whitewashed walls, balconies, and wonderful carven and studded
+  doors. The business of the town is done here. The Arabic quarter
+  lies back of it&mdash;a maze of narrow alleys winding aimlessly
+  here and there between high white buildings, with occasionally
+  the minarets and towers of a mosque. This district harboured,
+  besides the upper-class Swahilis and Arabs, a large number of
+  East Indians. Still back of this are thousands of the low grass,
+  or mud and wattle huts of the natives, their roofs thatched with
+  straw or palm. These are apparently arranged on little system.
+  The small European population lives atop the sea bluffs beyond
+  the old fort in the most attractive bungalows. This, the most
+  desirable location of all, has remained open to them because
+  heretofore the fierce wars with which Mombasa, "the Island of
+  Blood," has been swept have made the exposed seaward lands
+  impossible.</P>
+
+  <P>No idle occupation can be more fascinating than to wander
+  about the mazes of this ancient town. The variety of race and
+  occupation is something astounding. Probably the one human note
+  that, everywhere persisting, draws the whole together is
+  furnished by the water-carriers. Mombasa has no water system
+  whatever. The entire supply is drawn from numberless picturesque
+  wells scattered everywhere in the crowded centre, and distributed
+  mainly in Standard Oil cans suspended at either end of a short
+  pole. By dint of constant daily exercise, hauling water up from a
+  depth and carrying it various distances, these men have developed
+  the most beautifully powerful figures. They proceed at a half
+  trot, the slender poles, with forty pounds at either end, seeming
+  fairly to cut into their naked shoulders, muttering a word of
+  warning to the loiterers at every other breath&mdash;semeelay!
+  semeelay! No matter in what part of Mombasa you may happen to be,
+  or at what hour of the day or night, you will meet these
+  industrious little men trotting along under their burdens.</P>
+
+  <P>Everywhere also are the women, carrying themselves proudly
+  erect, with a free swing of the hips. They wear invariably a
+  single sheet of cotton cloth printed in blue or black with the
+  most astonishing borders and spotty designs. This is drawn tight
+  just above the breasts, leaving the shoulders and arms bare.
+  Their hair is divided into perhaps a dozen parts running
+  lengthwise of the head from the forehead to the nape of the neck,
+  after the manner of the stripes on a watermelon. Each part then
+  ends in a tiny twisted pigtail not over an inch long. The lobes
+  of their ears have been stretched until they hold thick round
+  disks about three inches in diameter, ornamented by concentric
+  circles of different colours, with a red bull's eye for a centre.
+  The outer edges of the ears are then further decorated with gold
+  clasps set closely together. Many bracelets, necklaces, and
+  armlets complete the get-up. They are big women, with soft
+  velvety skins and a proud and haughty carriage&mdash;the
+  counterparts of the men in the white robes and caps.</P>
+
+  <P>By the way, it may be a good place here to remark that these
+  garments, and the patterned squares of cloth worn by the women,
+  are invariably most spotlessly clean.</P>
+
+  <P>These, we learned, were the Swahilis, the ruling class, the
+  descendants of the slave traders. Beside them are all sorts and
+  conditions. Your true savage pleased his own fancy as to dress
+  and personal adornment. The bushmen generally shaved the edges of
+  their wool to leave a nice close-fitting natural skull cap, wore
+  a single blanket draped from one shoulder, and carried a war
+  club. The ear lobe seemed always to be stretched; sometimes
+  sufficiently to have carried a pint bottle. Indeed, white
+  marmalade jars seemed to be very popular wear. One ingenious
+  person had acquired a dozen of the sort of safety pins used to
+  fasten curtains to their rings. These he had snapped into the
+  lobes, six on a side.</P>
+
+  <P>We explored for some time. One of the Swahilis attached
+  himself to us so unobtrusively that before we knew it we had
+  accepted him as guide. In that capacity he realized an ideal, for
+  he never addressed a word to us, nor did he even stay in sight.
+  We wandered along at our sweet will, dawdling as slowly as we
+  pleased. The guide had apparently quite disappeared. Look where
+  we would we could in no manner discover him. At the next corner
+  we would pause, undecided as to what to do; there, in the middle
+  distance, would stand our friend, smiling. When he was sure we
+  had seen him, and were about to take the turn properly, he would
+  disappear again. Convoyed in this pleasant fashion we wound and
+  twisted up and down and round and about through the most
+  appalling maze. We saw the native markets with their vociferating
+  sellers seated cross-legged on tables behind piles of fruit or
+  vegetables, while an equally vociferating crowd surged up and
+  down the aisles. Gray parrots and little monkeys perched
+  everywhere about. Billy gave one of the monkeys a banana. He
+  peeled it exactly as a man would have done, smelt it critically,
+  and threw it back at her in the most insulting fashion. We saw
+  also the rows of Hindu shops open to the street, with their
+  gaudily dressed children of blackened eyelids, their stolid dirty
+  proprietors, and their women marvellous in bright silks and
+  massive bangles. In the thatched native quarter were more of the
+  fine Swahili women sitting cross-legged on the earth under low
+  verandas, engaged in different handicrafts; and chickens; and
+  many amusing naked children. We made friends with many of them,
+  communicating by laughter and by signs, while our guide stood
+  unobtrusively in the middle distance waiting for us to come on.
+  Just at sunset he led us out to a great open space, with a tall
+  palm in the centre of it and the gathering of a multitude of
+  people. A mollah was clambering into a high scaffold built of
+  poles, whence shortly he began to intone a long-drawn-out "Allah!
+  Allah! il Allah!" The cocoanut palms cut the sunset, and the
+  boabab trees&mdash;the fat, lazy boababs&mdash;looked more
+  monstrous than ever. We called our guide and conferred on him the
+  munificent sum of sixteen and a half cents; with which,
+  apparently much pleased, he departed. Then slowly we wandered
+  back to the hotel.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='PART_II' id="PART_II"></A>
+
+  <H2>PART II.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE SHIMBA HILLS.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='IX' id="IX"></A>
+
+  <H2>IX.</H2>
+
+  <P>A TROPICAL JUNGLE.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>Many months later, and after adventures elsewhere
+  described,<A name='FNanchor_3_3' id="FNanchor_3_3"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_3_3'><SUP>[3]</SUP></A> besides others not relevant
+  for the moment, F., an Englishman, and I returned to Mombasa. We
+  came from some hundred odd miles in the interior where we had
+  been exploring the sources and the course of the Tsavo River. Now
+  our purpose was to penetrate into the low, hot, wooded country
+  along the coast known as the Shimba Hills in quest of a rare
+  beast called the sable antelope.</P>
+
+  <P>These hills could be approached in one of two ways&mdash;by
+  crossing the harbour, and then marching two days afoot; or by
+  voyaging up to the very end of one of the long arms of the sea
+  that extend many miles inland. The latter involved dhows,
+  dependence on uncertain winds, favourable tides, and a heap of
+  good luck. It was less laborious but most uncertain. At this
+  stage of the plan the hotel manager came forward with the offer
+  of a gasoline launch, which we gladly accepted.</P>
+
+  <P>We embarked about noon, storing our native carriers and
+  effects aboard a dhow hired for the occasion. This we purposed
+  towing. A very neatly uniformed Swahili bearing on his stomach a
+  highly-polished brass label as big as a door plate&mdash;"Harbour
+  Police"&mdash;threw duck fists over what he called overloading
+  the boat. He knew very little about boats, but threw very
+  competent duck fists. As we did know something about boats, we
+  braved unknown consequences by disregarding him utterly. No
+  consequences ensued&mdash;unless perhaps to his own health. When
+  everything was aboard, that dhow was pretty well down, but still
+  well afloat. Then we white men took our places in the launch.</P>
+
+  <P>This was a long narrow affair with a four-cylinder
+  thirty-horsepower engine. As she possessed no speed gears, she
+  had either to plunge ahead full speed or come to a stop; there
+  were no compromises. Her steering was managed by a tiller instead
+  of a wheel, so that a mere touch sufficed to swerve her ten feet
+  from her course. As the dhow was in no respects built on such
+  nervous lines, she did occasionally some fancy and splashing
+  curves.</P>
+
+  <P>The pilot of the launch turned out to be a sandy-haired Yankee
+  who had been catching wild animals for Barnum and Bailey's
+  circus. While waiting for his ship, he, being a proverbial handy
+  Yankee, had taken on this job. He became quite interested in
+  telling us this, and at times forgot his duties at the tiller.
+  Then that racing-launch would take a wild swoop; the clumsy old
+  dhow astern would try vainly, with much spray and dangerous
+  careening, to follow; the compromise course would all but upset
+  her; the spray would fly; the safari boys would take their
+  ducking; the boat boys would yell and dance and lean frantically
+  against the two long sweeps with which they tried to steer. In
+  this wild and untrammelled fashion we careered up the bay, too
+  interested in our own performances to pay much attention to the
+  scenery. The low shores, with their cocoanut groves gracefully
+  rising above the mangrove tangle, slipped by, and the distant
+  blue Shimba Hills came nearer.</P>
+
+  <P>After a while we turned into a narrower channel with a good
+  many curves and a quite unknown depth of water. Down this we
+  whooped at the full speed of our thirty-horsepower engine.
+  Occasional natives, waist deep and fishing, stared after us
+  open-eyed. The Yankee ventured a guess as to how hard she would
+  hit on a mudbank. She promptly proved his guess a rank
+  underestimate by doing so. We fell in a heap on the bottom. The
+  dhow bore down on us with majestic momentum. The boat boys leaned
+  frantically on their sweeps, and managed just to avoid us. The
+  dhow also rammed the mudbank. A dozen reluctant boys hopped
+  overboard and pushed us off. We pursued our merry way again. On
+  either hand now appeared fish weirs of plaited coco fibre; which,
+  being planted in the shallows, helped us materially to guess at
+  the channel. Naked men, up to their shoulders in the water,
+  attended to some mysterious need of the nets, or emerged dripping
+  and sparkling from the water with baskets of fish atop their
+  heads. The channel grew even narrower, and the mudbanks more
+  frequent. We dodged a dozen in our headlong course. Our local
+  guide, a Swahili in tarboosh and a beautiful saffron robe, showed
+  signs of strong excitement. We were to stop, he said, around the
+  next bend; and at this rate we never could stop. The Yankee
+  remarked, superfluously, that it would be handy if this
+  dod-blistered engine had a clutch; adding, as an afterthought,
+  that no matter how long he stayed in the tropics his nose peeled.
+  We asked what we should do if we over-carried our prospective
+  landing-place. He replied that the dod-blistered thing did have a
+  reverse. While thus conversing we shot around a corner into a
+  complete cul-de-sac! Everything was shut off hastily, and an
+  instant later we and the dhow smashed up high and dry on a cozy
+  mud beach! We drew a deep breath and looked around us.</P>
+
+  <P>Mangrove thicket to the edge of the slimy ooze; trees
+  behind&mdash;that was all we could see. We gave our attention to
+  the business of getting our men, our effects, and ourselves
+  ashore. The ooze proved to be just above knee deep. The porters
+  had a fearful and floundering time, and received much obvious
+  comment from us perched in the bow of the launch. Finally
+  everything was debarked. F. and I took off our boots; but our
+  gunbearers expressed such horror at the mere thought of our
+  plunging into the mud, that we dutifully climbed them pick-a-back
+  and were carried. The hard shell beach was a hundred feet away,
+  occupying a little recess where the persistent tough mangroves
+  drew back. From it led a narrow path through the thicket. We
+  waved and shouted a farewell to the crews of the launch and the
+  dhow.</P>
+
+  <P>The path for a hundred feet was walled in by the mangroves
+  through which scuttled and rattled the big land crabs. Then
+  suddenly we found ourselves in a story-book tropical paradise.
+  The tall coco palms rose tufted above everything; the fans of the
+  younger palms waved below; bananas thrust the banners of their
+  broad leaves wherever they could find space; creepers and vines
+  flung the lush luxuriance of their greenery over all the earth
+  and into the depths of all the half-guessed shadows. In no
+  direction could one see unobstructed farther than twenty feet,
+  except straight up; and there one could see just as far as the
+  tops of the palms. It was like being in a room&mdash;a green,
+  hot, steamy, lovely room. Very bright-coloured birds that ought
+  really to have been at home in their cages fluttered about.</P>
+
+  <P>We had much vigorous clearing to do to make room for our
+  tents. By the time the job was finished we were all pretty hot.
+  Several of the boys made vain attempts to climb for nuts, but
+  without success. We had brought them with us from the interior,
+  where cocoanuts do not grow; and they did not understand the
+  method. They could swarm up the tall slim stems all right, but
+  could not manage to get through the downward-pointing spikes of
+  the dead leaves. F. tried and failed, to the great amusement of
+  the men, but to the greater amusement of myself. I was a wise
+  person, and lay on my back on a canvas cot, so it was not much
+  bother to look up and enjoy life. Not to earn absolutely the
+  stigma of laziness, I tried to shoot some nuts down. This did not
+  work either, for the soft, spongy stems closed around the bullet
+  holes. Then a little wizened monkey of a Swahili porter, having
+  watched our futile performances with interest, nonchalantly
+  swarmed up; in some mysterious manner he wriggled through the
+  defences, and perched in the top, whence he dropped to us a dozen
+  big green nuts. Our men may not have been much of a success at
+  climbing for nuts; but they were passed masters at the art of
+  opening them. Three or four clips from their awkward swordlike
+  pangas, and we were each presented with a clean, beautiful,
+  natural goblet brimming full of a refreshing drink.</P>
+
+  <P>About this time a fine figure of a man drifted into camp. He
+  was very smooth-skinned, very dignified, very venerable. He was
+  pure Swahili, though of the savage branch of that race, and had
+  none of the negro type of countenance. In fact, so like was he in
+  face, hair, short square beard and genial dignity to a certain
+  great-uncle of mine that it was very hard to remember that he had
+  on only a small strip of cloth, that he was cherishing as a great
+  treasure a piece of soap box he had salvaged from the shore, and
+  that his skin was red chocolate. I felt inclined to talk to him
+  as to an intellectual equal, especially as he had a fine resonant
+  bass voice that in itself lent his remarks some importance.
+  However, I gave him two ordinary wood screws, showed him how they
+  screwed in and out, and left him happy.</P>
+
+  <P>After supper the moon rose, casting shadows of new and unknown
+  shapes through this strangely new and unknown forest. A thin
+  white mist ascending everywhere from the soil tempered but could
+  not obscure the white brilliance. The thermometer stood now only
+  at 82&deg;, but the dripping tropical sweat-bath in which our
+  camp was pitched considerably raised the sensible heat. A bird
+  with a most diabolical shrieking note cursed in the shadows.
+  Another, a pigeon-like creature, began softly, and continued to
+  repeat in diminishing energy until it seemed to have run down,
+  like a piece of clockwork.</P>
+
+  <P>Our way next morning led for some time through this lovely but
+  damp jungle. Then we angled up the side of a hill to emerge into
+  the comparatively open country atop what we Westerners would call
+  a "hog's back"&mdash;a long narrow spurlike ridge mounting slowly
+  to the general elevation of the main hills. Here were high green
+  bushes, with little free open passages between them, and
+  occasionally meadow-like openings running down the slopes on one
+  side or the other. Before us, some miles distant, were the
+  rounded blue hills.</P>
+
+  <P>We climbed steadily. It was still very early morning, but
+  already the day was hot. Pretty soon we saw over the jungle to
+  the gleaming waters of the inlet, and then to the sea. Our "hog's
+  back" led us past a ridge of the hills, and before we knew it we
+  had been deposited in a shallow valley three or four miles wide
+  between parallel ridges; the said valley being at a considerable
+  elevation, and itself diversified with rolling hills, ravines,
+  meadow land, and wide flats. On many of the ridges were scattered
+  cocoanut palms, and occasional mango groves, while many smokes
+  attested the presence of natives.</P>
+
+  <P>These we found in shambas or groups of little farms, huddled
+  all together, with wilderness and brush and trees, or the wide
+  open green grass lawn between. The houses were very large and
+  neat-looking. They were constructed quite ingeniously from coco
+  branches. Each branch made one mat. The leaves were all brought
+  over to the same side of the stem, and then plaited. The
+  resulting mat was then six or seven feet long by from twelve to
+  sixteen inches broad, and could be used for a variety of
+  purposes. Indeed, we found Melville's chapter in "Typhee" as to
+  the various uses of the cocoanut palm by no means exaggerated.
+  The nuts, leaves, and fibre supplied every conceivable human
+  want.</P>
+
+  <P>The natives were a pleasant, friendly, good-looking lot. In
+  fact, so like was their cast of countenance to that of the
+  white-skinned people we were accustomed to see that we had great
+  difficulty in realizing that they were mere savages,
+  costume&mdash;or lack of it&mdash;to the contrary
+  notwithstanding. Under a huge mango tree two were engaged in
+  dividing a sheep. Sixty or seventy others stood solemnly around
+  watching. It may have been a religious ceremony, for all I know;
+  but the affair looked to be about two parts business to sixty of
+  idle and cheerful curiosity. We stopped and talked to them a
+  little, chaffed the pretty girls&mdash;they were really
+  pretty&mdash;and marched on.</P>
+
+  <P>About noon our elegant guide stopped, struck an attitude, and
+  pointed with his silver-headed rattan cane.</P>
+
+  <P>"This," said he, "is where we must camp."</P>
+
+  <P>We marched through a little village. A family party sat
+  beneath the veranda of a fine building&mdash;a very old wrinkled
+  couple; two stalwart beautiful youths; a young mother suckling
+  her baby; two young girls; and eight or ten miscellaneous and
+  naked youngsters. As the rest of the village appeared to be
+  empty, I imagined this to be the caretaker's family, and the
+  youngsters to belong to others. We stopped and spoke, were
+  answered cheerfully, suggested that we might like to buy
+  chickens, and offered a price. Instantly with a whoop of joy the
+  lot of them were afoot. The fowl waited for no further
+  intimations of troublous times, but fled squawking. They had been
+  there before. So had our hosts; for inside a minute they had
+  returned, each with a chicken&mdash;and a broad grin.</P>
+
+  <P>After due payment we proceeded on a few hundred yards, and
+  pitched camp beneath two huge mango trees.</P>
+
+  <P>Besides furnishing one of the most delicious of the tropical
+  fruits, the mango is also one of the most beautiful of trees. It
+  is tall, spreads very wide, and its branches sweep to within ten
+  feet of the ground. Its perfect symmetry combined with the size
+  and deep green of its leaves causes it to resemble, from a short
+  distance, a beautiful green hill. Beneath its umbrella one finds
+  dense shade, unmottled by a single ray of sunlight, so that one
+  can lie under it in full confidence. For, parenthetically, even a
+  single ray of this tropical sunlight is to the unprotected a very
+  dangerous thing. But the leaves of the mango have this
+  peculiarity, which distinguishes it from all other
+  trees&mdash;namely, that they grow only at the very ends of the
+  small twigs and branches. As these, of course, grow only at the
+  ends of the big limbs, it follows that from beneath the mango
+  looks like a lofty green dome, a veritable pantheon of the
+  forest.</P>
+
+  <P>We made our camp under one of these trees; gave ourselves all
+  the space we could use; and had plenty left over&mdash;five tents
+  and a cook camp, with no crowding. It was one of the pleasantest
+  camps I ever saw. Our green dome overhead protected us absolutely
+  from the sun; high sweet grass grew all about us; the breeze
+  wandered lazily up from the distant Indian Ocean. Directly before
+  our tent door the slope fell gently away through a sparse
+  cocoanut grove whose straight stems panelled our view, then rose
+  again to the clear-cut outline of a straight ridge opposite. The
+  crest of this was sentinelled by tall scattered cocoanut trees,
+  the "bursting star" pyrotechnic effect of their tops being
+  particularly fine against the sky.</P>
+
+  <P>After a five hours' tropical march uphill we were glad to sit
+  under our green dome, to look at our view, to enjoy the little
+  breeze, and to drink some of the cocoanuts our friends the
+  villagers brought in.</P>
+
+  <P>FOOTNOTES:</P><A name='Footnote_3_3' id=
+  "Footnote_3_3"></A><A href='#FNanchor_3_3'>[3]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>"The Land of Footprints."</P>
+  </DIV>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='X' id="X"></A>
+
+  <H2>X.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE SABLE.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>About three o'clock I began to feel rested and ambitious.
+  Therefore I called up our elegant guide and Memba Sasa, and set
+  out on my first hunt for sable. F. was rather more done up by the
+  hard morning, and so did not go along. The guide wore still his
+  red tarboosh, his dark short jacket, his saffron yellow nether
+  garment&mdash;it was not exactly a skirt&mdash;and his
+  silver-headed rattan cane. The only change he made was to tuck up
+  the skirt, leaving his long legs bare. It hardly seemed
+  altogether a suitable costume for hunting; but he seemed to know
+  what he was about.</P>
+
+  <P>We marched along ridges, and down into ravines, and across
+  gulleys choked with brush. Horrible thickets alternated with and
+  occasionally surrounded open green meadows hanging against the
+  side hills. As we proceeded, the country became rougher, the
+  ravines more precipitous. We struggled up steep hills, fairly
+  bucking our way through low growth that proved all but
+  impenetrable. The idea was to find a sable feeding in one of the
+  little open glades; but whenever I allowed myself to think of the
+  many adverse elements of the game, the chances seemed very slim.
+  It took a half-hour to get from one glade to the next; there were
+  thousands of glades. The sable is a rare shy animal that likes
+  dense cover fully as well if not better than the open. Sheer rank
+  bull luck alone seemed the only hope. And as I felt my strength
+  going in that vicious struggle against heavy brush and steep
+  hills, I began to have very strong doubts indeed as to that
+  sable.</P>
+
+  <P>For it was cruel, hard work. In this climate one hailed a car
+  or a rickshaw to do an errand two streets away, and considered
+  oneself quite a hero if one took a leisurely two-mile stroll
+  along the cliff heads at sunset. Here I was, after a five-hour
+  uphill march, bucking into brush and through country that would
+  be considered difficult going even in Canada. At the end of
+  twenty minutes my every garment was not wringing but dripping
+  wet, so that when I carried my rifle over my arm water ran down
+  the barrel and off the muzzle in a steady stream. After a bit of
+  this my knees began to weaken; and it became a question of saving
+  energy, of getting along somehow, and of leaving the actual
+  hunting to Memba Sasa and the guide. If they had shown me a
+  sable, I very much doubt if I could have hit it.</P>
+
+  <P>However, we did not see one, and I staggered into camp at dusk
+  pretty well exhausted. From the most grateful hot bath and clean
+  clothes I derived much refreshment. Shortly I was sitting in my
+  canvas chair, sipping a cocoanut, and describing the condition of
+  affairs to F., who was naturally very curious as to how the trick
+  was done.</P>
+
+  <P>"Now," I concluded, "I know just about what I can and what I
+  cannot do. Three days more of this sort of work will feed me up.
+  If we do not run across a sable in that time, I'm afraid we don't
+  get any."</P>
+
+  <P>"Two days will do for me," said he.</P>
+
+  <P>We called up the guide and questioned him closely. He seemed
+  quite confident; and asserted that in this country sable were
+  found, when they were found at all, which was not often. They
+  must be discovered in the small grassy openings. We began to
+  understand why so very few people get sable.</P>
+
+  <P>We dismissed the guide, and sat quietly smoking in the warm
+  soft evening. The air was absolutely still save for various night
+  insects and birds, and the weird calling of natives across the
+  valleys. Far out towards the sea a thunderstorm flashed; and
+  after a long interval the rumblings came to us. So very distant
+  was it that we paid it little attention, save as an interesting
+  background to our own still evening. Almost between sentences of
+  our slow conversation, however, it rushed up to the zenith,
+  blotting out the stars. The tall palms began to sway and rustle
+  in the forerunning breeze. Then with a swoop it was upon us, a
+  tempest of fury. We turned in; and all night long the heavy
+  deluges of rain fell, roaring like surf on an unfriendly
+  coast.</P>
+
+  <P>By morning this had fallen to a light, steady drizzle in which
+  we started off quite happily. In this climate one likes to get
+  wet. The ground was sodden and deep with muck. Within a mile of
+  camp we saw many fresh buffalo tracks.</P>
+
+  <P>This time we went downhill and still downhill through openings
+  among batches of great forest trees. The new leaves were just
+  coming out in pinks and russets, so that the effect at a little
+  distance was almost precisely that of our autumn foliage in its
+  duller phases. So familiar were made some of the low rounded
+  knolls that for an instant we were respectively back in the hills
+  of Surrey or Michigan, and told each other so.</P>
+
+  <P>Thus we moved slowly out from the dense cover to the grass
+  openings. Far over on another ridge F. called my attention to
+  something jet-black and indeterminate. In another country I
+  should have named it as a charred log on an old pine burning, for
+  that was precisely what it looked like. We glanced at it casually
+  through our glasses. It was a sable buck lying down right out in
+  the open. He was black and sleek, and we could make out his
+  sweeping scimitar horns.</P>
+
+  <P>Memba Sasa and the Swahili dropped flat on their faces while
+  F. and I crawled slowly and cautiously through the mud until we
+  had gained the cover of a shallow ravine that ran in the beast's
+  general direction. Noting carefully a certain small thicket as
+  landmark, we stooped and moved as fast as we could down to that
+  point of vantage. There we cautiously parted the grasses and
+  looked. The sable had disappeared. The place where he had been
+  lying was plainly to be identified, and there was no cover save a
+  tiny bush between two and three feet high. We were quite certain
+  he had neither seen nor winded us. Either he had risen and fled
+  forward into the ravine up which we had made our stalk, or else
+  he had entered the small thicket. F. agreed to stay on watch
+  where he was, while I slipped back and examined the earth to
+  leeward of the thicket.</P>
+
+  <P>I had hardly crawled ten yards, however, before the gentle
+  snapping of F.'s fingers recalled me to his side.</P>
+
+  <P>"He's behind that bush," he whispered in my ear.</P>
+
+  <P>I looked. The bush was hardly large enough to conceal a setter
+  dog, and the sable is somewhat larger than our elk. Nevertheless
+  F. insisted that the animal was standing behind it, and that he
+  had caught the toss of its head. We lay still for some time,
+  while the soft, warm rain drizzled down on us, our eyes riveted
+  on the bush. And then we caught the momentary flash of curved
+  horns as the sable tossed his head. It seemed incredible even
+  then that the tiny bush should conceal so large a beast. As a
+  matter of fact we later found that the bush grew on a slight
+  elevation, behind which was a depression. In this the sable
+  stood, patiently enduring the drizzle.</P>
+
+  <P>We waited some time in hopes he would move forward a foot or
+  so; but apparently he had selected his loafing place with care,
+  and liked it. The danger of a shift of wind was always present.
+  Finally I slipped back over the brink of the ravine, moved three
+  yards to the left, and crawled up through the tall dripping grass
+  to a new position behind a little bush. Cautiously raising my
+  head, I found I could see plainly the sable's head and part of
+  his shoulders. My position was cramped and out of balance for
+  offhand shooting; but I did my best, and heard the loud plunk of
+  the hit. The sable made off at a fast though rather awkward
+  gallop, wheeled for an instant a hundred yards farther on,
+  received another bullet in the shoulder, and disappeared over the
+  brow of the hill. We raced over the top to get in another shot,
+  and found him stone dead.</P>
+
+  <P>He was a fine beast, jet-black in coat, with white markings on
+  the face, red-brown ears, and horns sweeping up and back scimitar
+  fashion. He stood four feet and six inches at the shoulder, and
+  his horns were the second best ever shot in British East Africa.
+  This beast has been described by Heller as a new subspecies, and
+  named Rooseveltii. His description was based upon an immature
+  buck and a doe shot by Kermit Roosevelt. The determination of
+  subspecies on so slight evidence seems to me unscientific in the
+  extreme. While the immature males do exhibit the general brown
+  tone relied on by Mr. Heller, the mature buck differs in no
+  essential from the tropical sable. I find the alledged subspecies
+  is not accepted by European scientists.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XI' id="XI"></A>
+
+  <H2>XI.</H2>
+
+  <P>A MARCH ALONG THE COAST.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>With a most comfortable feeling that my task was done, that
+  suddenly the threatening clouds of killing work had been cleared
+  up, I was now privileged to loaf and invite my soul on this
+  tropical green hilltop while poor F. put in the days trying to
+  find another sable. Every morning he started out before daylight.
+  I could see the light of his lantern outside the tent; and I
+  stretched myself in the luxurious consciousness that I should
+  hear no deprecating but insistent "hodie" from my boy until I
+  pleased to invite it. In the afternoon or evening F. would
+  return, quite exhausted and dripping, with only the report of new
+  country traversed. No sable; no tracks of sable; no old signs,
+  even, of sable. Gradually it was borne in on me how lucky I was
+  to have come upon my magnificent specimen so promptly and in such
+  favourable circumstances.</P>
+
+  <P>A leisurely breakfast alone, with the sun climbing; then the
+  writing of notes, a little reading, and perhaps a stroll to the
+  village or along the top of the ridge. At the heat of noon a
+  siesta with a cool cocoanut at my elbow. The view was beautiful
+  on all sides; our great tree full of birds; the rising and dying
+  winds in the palms like the gathering oncoming rush of the rains.
+  From mountain to mountain sounded the wild, far-carrying
+  ululations of the natives, conveying news or messages across the
+  wide jungle. Towards sunset I wandered out in the groves,
+  enjoying the many bright flowers, the tall, sweet grasses, and
+  the cocoa-palms against the sky. Piles of cocoanuts lay on the
+  ground, covered each with a leaf plaited in a peculiarly
+  individual manner to indicate ownership. Small boys, like little
+  black imps, clung naked half-way up the slim trunks of the palms,
+  watching me bright-eyed above the undergrowth. In all directions,
+  crossing and recrossing, ran a maze of beaten paths. Each led
+  somewhere, but it would require the memory of&mdash;well, of a
+  native, to keep all their destinations in mind.</P>
+
+  <P>I used to follow some of them to their ending in little
+  cocoa-leaf houses on the tops of knolls or beneath mangoes; and
+  would talk with the people. They were very grave and very polite,
+  and seemed to be living out their lives quite correctly according
+  to their conceptions. Again, it was borne in on me that these
+  people are not stumbling along the course of evolution in our
+  footsteps, but have gone as far in their path as we have in ours;
+  that they have reached at least as complete a correspondence with
+  their environment as we with our own.<A name='FNanchor_4_4' id=
+  "FNanchor_4_4"></A><A href='#Footnote_4_4'><SUP>[4]</SUP></A></P>
+
+  <P>If F. had not returned by the time I reached camp, I would
+  seat myself in my canvas chair, and thence dispense justice,
+  advice, or medical treatment. If none of these things seemed
+  demanded, I smoked my pipe. To me one afternoon came a
+  big-framed, old, dignified man, with the heavy beard, the noble
+  features, the high forehead, and the blank statue eyes of the
+  blind Homer. He was led by a very small, very bright-eyed naked
+  boy. At some twenty feet distance he squatted down cross-legged
+  before me. For quite five minutes he sat there silent, while I
+  sat in my camp chair, smoked and waited. At last he spoke in a
+  rolling deep bass voice rich and vibrating&mdash;a delight to
+  hear.</P>
+
+  <P>"Jambo (greeting)!" said he.</P>
+
+  <P>"Jambo!" I replied mildly.</P>
+
+  <P>Again a five-minute silence. I had begun reading, and had all
+  but forgotten his presence.</P>
+
+  <P>"Jambo bwana (greeting, master)!" he rolled out.</P>
+
+  <P>"Jambo!" I repeated.</P>
+
+  <P>The same dignified, unhasting pause.</P>
+
+  <P>"Jambo bwana m'kubwa (greeting, great master)!"</P>
+
+  <P>"Jambo!" quoth I, and went on reading. The sun was dropping,
+  but the old man seemed in no hurry.</P>
+
+  <P>"Jambo bwana m'kubwa sana (greeting, most mighty master)!" he
+  boomed at last.</P>
+
+  <P>"Jambo!" said I.</P>
+
+  <P>This would seem to strike the superlative, and I expected now
+  that he would state his business, but the old man had one more
+  shot in his locker.</P>
+
+  <P>"Jambo bwana m'kubwa kabeesa sana (greeting, mightiest
+  possible master)!" it came.</P>
+
+  <P>Then in due course he delicately hinted that a gift of tobacco
+  would not come amiss.</P>
+
+  <P>F. returned a trifle earlier than usual, to admit that his
+  quest was hopeless, that his physical forces were for the time
+  being at an end, and that he was willing to go home.</P>
+
+  <P>Accordingly very early next morning we set out by the glimmer
+  of a lantern, hoping to get a good start on our journey before
+  the heat of the day became too severe. We did gain something, but
+  performed several unnecessary loops and semicircles in the maze
+  of beaten paths before we finally struck into one that led down
+  the slope towards the sea. Shortly after the dawn came up "like
+  thunder" in its swiftness, followed almost immediately by the
+  sun.</P>
+
+  <P>Our way now led along the wide flat between the seashore and
+  the Shimba Hills, in which we had been hunting. A road ten feet
+  wide and innocent of wheels ran with obstinate directness up and
+  down the slight contours and through the bushes and cocoanut
+  groves that lay in its path. So mathematically straight was it
+  that only when perspective closed it in, or when it dropped over
+  the summit of a little rise, did the eye lose the effect of its
+  interminability. The country through which this road led was
+  various&mdash;open bushy veld with sparse trees, dense jungle,
+  cocoanut groves, tall and cool. In the shadows of the latter were
+  the thatched native villages. To the left always ran the blue
+  Shimba Hills; and far away to the right somewhere we heard the
+  grumbling of the sea.</P>
+
+  <P>Every hundred yards or so we met somebody. Even thus early the
+  road was thronged. By far the majority were the almost naked
+  natives of the district, pleasant, brown-skinned people with good
+  features. They carried things. These things varied from great
+  loads balanced atop to dainty impromptu baskets woven of
+  cocoa-leaves and containing each a single cocoanut. They smiled
+  on us, returned our greeting, and stood completely aside to let
+  us pass. Other wayfarers were of more importance. Small groups of
+  bearded dignitaries, either upper-class Swahili or pure Arabs,
+  strolled slowly along, apparently with limitless leisure, but
+  evidently bound somewhere, nevertheless. They replied to our
+  greetings with great dignity. Once, also, we overtook a small
+  detachment of Sudanese troops moving. They were scattered over
+  several miles of road. A soldier, most impressive and neat in
+  khaki and red tarboosh and sash; then two or three of his
+  laughing, sleek women, clad in the thin, patterned "'Mericani,"
+  glittering with gold ornaments; then a half dozen ragged porters
+  carrying official but battered painted wooden kit boxes, or bags,
+  or miscellaneous curious plunder; then more troopers; and so on
+  for miles. They all drew aside for us most respectfully; and the
+  soldiers saluted, very smart and military.</P>
+
+  <P>Under the broad-spreading mangoes near the villages we came
+  upon many open markets in full swing. Each vendor squatted on his
+  heels behind his wares, while the purchasers or traders wandered
+  here and there making offers. The actual commerce compared with
+  the amount of laughing, joking, shrieking joy of the occasion as
+  one to a thousand.</P>
+
+  <P>Generally three or four degenerate looking dirty East Indians
+  slunk about, very crafty, very insinuating, very ready and
+  skilful to take what advantages they could. I felt a strong
+  desire to kick every one of them out from these joyful concourses
+  of happy people. Generally we sat down for a while in these
+  markets, and talked to the people a little, and perhaps purchased
+  some of the delicious fruit. They had a small delicate variety of
+  banana, most wonderful, the like of which I have seen nowhere
+  else. We bought forty of these for a coin worth about eight
+  cents. Besides fruit they offered cocoanuts in all forms, grain,
+  woven baskets, small articles of handicraft&mdash;and fish. The
+  latter were farther from the sea than they should have been!
+  These occasional halts greatly refreshed us for more of that
+  endless road.</P>
+
+  <P>For all this time we were very hot. As the sun mounted, the
+  country fairly steamed. From the end of my rifle barrel, which I
+  carried across my forearm, a steady trickle of water dripped into
+  the road. We neither of us had a dry stitch on us, and our light
+  garments clung to us thoroughly wet through. At first we tried
+  the military method, and marched fifty minutes to rest ten, but
+  soon discovered that twenty-five minutes' work to five minutes
+  off was more practical. The sheer weight of the sun was terrific;
+  after we had been exposed to it for any great length of
+  time&mdash;as across several wide open spaces&mdash;we entered
+  the steaming shade of the jungle with gratitude. At the end of
+  seven hours, however, we most unexpectedly came through a dense
+  cocoanut grove plump on the banks of the harbour at
+  Kilindini.</P>
+
+  <P>Here, after making arrangements for the transport of our
+  safari, when it should arrive, we entrusted ourselves to a small
+  boy and a cranky boat. An hour later, clad in tropical white,
+  with cool drinks at our elbows, we sat in easy-chairs on the
+  veranda of the Mombasa Club.</P>
+
+  <P>The clubhouse is built on a low cliff at the water's edge. It
+  looks across the blue waters of the bay to a headland crowned
+  with cocoa-palms, and beyond the headland to the Indian Ocean.
+  The cool trades sweep across that veranda. We idly watched a lone
+  white oarsman pulling strongly against the wind through the tide
+  rips, evidently bent on exercise. We speculated on the incredible
+  folly of wanting exercise; and forgot him. An hour later a huge
+  saffron yellow squall rose from China 'cross the way, filled the
+  world with an unholy light, lashed the reluctant sea to
+  white-caps, and swooped screaming on the cocoa-palms. Police
+  boats to rescue the idiot oarsman! Much minor excitement! Great
+  rushing to and fro! We continued to sit in our lounging chairs,
+  one hand on our cool long drinks.</P>
+
+  <P>FOOTNOTES:</P><A name='Footnote_4_4' id=
+  "Footnote_4_4"></A><A href='#FNanchor_4_4'>[4]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>For a fuller discussion, see "The Land of Footprints."</P>
+  </DIV>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XII' id="XII"></A>
+
+  <H2>XII.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE FIRE.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>We were very tired, so we turned in early. W Unfortunately,
+  our rooms were immediately over the billiard room, where a
+  bibulous and cosmopolitan lot were earnestly endeavouring to
+  bolster up by further proof the fiction that a white man cannot
+  retain his health in the tropics. The process was pretty rackety,
+  and while it could not keep us awake, it prevented us from
+  falling thoroughly asleep. At length, and suddenly, the props of
+  noise fell away from me, and I sank into a grateful, profound
+  abyss.</P>
+
+  <P>Almost at once, however, I was dragged back to consciousness.
+  Mohammed stood at my bedside.</P>
+
+  <P>"Bwana," he proffered to my rather angry inquiry, "all the
+  people have gone to the fire. It is a very large fire. I thought
+  you would like to see it."</P>
+
+  <P>I glanced out of the window at the reddening sky, thrust my
+  feet into a pair of slippers, and went forth in my pyjamas to see
+  what I could see.</P>
+
+  <P>We threaded our way through many narrow dark and deserted
+  streets, beneath balconies that overhung, past walls over which
+  nodded tufted palms, until a loud and increasing murmuring told
+  us we were nearing the centre of disturbance. Shortly, we came to
+  the outskirts of the excited crowd, and beyond them saw the red
+  furnace glow.</P>
+
+  <P>"Semeelay! Semeelay!" warned Mohammed authoritatively; and the
+  bystanders, seeing a white face, gave me passage.</P>
+
+  <P>All of picturesque Mombasa was afoot&mdash;Arabs, Swahilis,
+  Somalis, savages, Indians&mdash;the whole lot. They moved
+  restlessly in the narrow streets; they hung over the edges of
+  balconies; they peered from barred windows; interested dark faces
+  turned up everywhere in the flickering light. One woman, a fine,
+  erect, biblical figure, stood silhouetted on a flat housetop and
+  screamed steadily. I thought she must have at least one baby in
+  the fire, but it seems she was only excited.</P>
+
+  <P>The fire was at present confined to two buildings, in which it
+  was raging fiercely. Its spread, however, seemed certain; and, as
+  it was surrounded by warehouses of valuable goods, moving was in
+  full swing. A frantic white man stood at the low doorway of one
+  of these dungeon-like stores hastening the movements of an
+  unending string of porters. As each emerged bearing a case on his
+  shoulder, the white man urged him to a trot. I followed up the
+  street to see where these valuables were being taken, and what
+  were the precautions against theft. Around the next corner, it
+  seemed. As each excited perspiring porter trotted up, he heaved
+  his burden from his head or his shoulders, and promptly scampered
+  back for another load. They were loyal and zealous men; but their
+  headpieces were deficient inside. For the burdens that they saved
+  from the fire happened to be cases of gin in bottles. At least,
+  it was in bottles until the process of saving had been completed.
+  Then it trickled merrily down the gutter. I went back and told
+  the frantic white man about it. He threw up both hands to heaven
+  and departed.</P>
+
+  <P>By dodging from street to street Mohammed and I succeeded in
+  circling the whole disturbance, and so came at length to a public
+  square. Here was a vast throng, and a very good place, so I
+  climbed atop a rescued bale of cotton the better to see.</P>
+
+  <P>Mombasa has no water system, but a wonderful corps of
+  water-carriers. These were in requisition to a man. They
+  disappeared down through the wide gates of the customs enclosure,
+  their naked, muscular, light-brown bodies gleaming with sweat,
+  their Standard Oil cans dangling merrily at the ends of slender
+  poles. A moment later they emerged, the cans full of salt water
+  from the bay, the poles seeming fairly to butt into their bare
+  shoulders as they teetered along at their rapid, swaying,
+  burdened gait.</P>
+
+  <P>The moment they entered the square they were seized upon from
+  a dozen different sides. There was no system at all. Every owner
+  of property was out for himself, and intended to get as much of
+  the precious water as he could. The poor carriers were pulled
+  about, jerked violently here and there, besought, commanded, to
+  bring their loads to one or the other of the threatened premises.
+  Vociferations, accusations, commands arose to screams. One old
+  graybeard occupied himself by standing on tiptoe and screeching,
+  "Maji! maji! maji!" at the top of his voice, as though that added
+  anything to the visible supply. The water-carrier of the moment
+  disappeared in a swirl of excited contestants. He was attending
+  strictly to business, looking neither to right nor to left,
+  pushing forward as steadily as he could, gasping mechanically his
+  customary warning, "Semeelay! Semeelay!" Somehow, eventually, he
+  and his comrades must have got somewhere; for after an interval
+  he returned with empty buckets. Then every blessed fool of a
+  property owner took a whack at his bare shoulders as he passed,
+  shrieking hysterically, "Haya! haya! pesi! pesi!" and the like to
+  men already doing their best. It was a grand sight!</P>
+
+  <P>In the meantime the fire itself was roaring away. The old
+  graybeard suddenly ceased crying "maji," and darted forward to
+  where I stood on the bale of cotton. With great but somewhat
+  flurried respect he begged me to descend. I did so, somewhat
+  curious as to what he might be up to, for the cotton was at least
+  two hundred feet from the fire. Immediately he began to tug and
+  heave; the bale was almost beyond his strength; but after
+  incredible exertions he lifted one side of it, poised it for a
+  moment, got his shoulder under it, and rolled it over once. Then
+  he darted away and resumed his raucous cry for water. I climbed
+  back again. Thrice more, at intervals, he repeated this
+  performance. The only result was to daub with mud every possible
+  side of that bale. I hope it was his property.</P>
+
+  <P>You must remember that I was observing the heavy artillery of
+  the attack on the conflagration. Individual campaigns were
+  everywhere in progress. I saw one man standing on the roof of a
+  threatened building. He lowered slowly, hand over hand, a small
+  tea-kettle at the end of a string. This was filled by a friend in
+  the street, whereupon the man hauled it up again, slowly, hand
+  over hand, and solemnly dashed its contents into the mouth of the
+  furnace. Thousands of other men on roofs, in balconies, on the
+  street, were doing the same thing. Some had ordinary cups which
+  they filled a block away! The limit of efficiency was a pail.
+  Nobody did anything in concert with anybody else. The sight of
+  these thousands of little midgets each with his teacup, or his
+  teapot, or his tin pail, throwing each his mite of
+  water&mdash;for which he had to walk a street or so&mdash;into
+  the ravening roaring furnace of flame was as pathetic or as
+  comical as you please. They did not seem to have a show in the
+  world.</P>
+
+  <P>Nevertheless, to my vast surprise, the old system of the East
+  triumphed at last. The system of the East is that if you get
+  <I>enough</I> labour you can accomplish anything. Little by
+  little those thousands of tea kettles of water had their
+  aggregate effect. The flames fed themselves out and died down
+  leaving the contiguous buildings unharmed save for a little
+  scorching. In two hours all was safe, and I returned to the
+  hotel, having enjoyed myself hugely. I had, however, in the
+  interest and excitement, forgotten how deadly is the fever of
+  Mombasa. Midnight in pyjamas did the business; and shortly I paid
+  well for the fun.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='PART_III' id="PART_III"></A>
+
+  <H2>PART III.</H2>
+
+  <P>NAIROBI.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XIII' id="XIII"></A>
+
+  <H2>XIII.</H2>
+
+  <P>UP FROM THE COAST.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>Nairobi is situated at the far edge of the great Athi Plains
+  and just below a range of hills. It might about as well have been
+  anywhere else, and perhaps better a few miles back in the higher
+  country. Whether the funny little narrow-gauge railroad exists
+  for Nairobi, or Nairobi for the railroad, it would be difficult
+  to say. Between Mombasa and this interior placed-to-order town,
+  certainly, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, either in
+  passengers or freight, to justify building the line. That
+  distance is, if I remember it correctly, about three hundred and
+  twenty miles. A dozen or so names of stations appear on the map.
+  These are water tanks, telegraph stations, or small groups of
+  tents in which dwell black labourers&mdash;on the railroad.</P>
+
+  <P>The way climbs out from the tropical steaming coast belt to
+  and across the high scrub desert, and then through lower rounded
+  hills to the plains. On the desert is only dense thorn
+  brush&mdash;and a possibility that the newcomer, if he looks very
+  closely, may to his excitement see his first game in Africa. This
+  is a stray duiker or so, tiny grass antelopes a foot high. Also
+  in this land is thirst; so that alongside the locomotives, as
+  they struggle up grade, in bad seasons, run natives to catch
+  precious drops.<A name='FNanchor_5_5' id=
+  "FNanchor_5_5"></A><A href='#Footnote_5_5'><SUP>[5]</SUP></A> An
+  impalpable red dust sifts through and into everything. When a man
+  descends at Voi for dinner he finds his fellow-travellers have
+  changed complexion. The pale clerk from indoor Mombasa has put on
+  a fine healthy sunburn; and the company in general present a rich
+  out-of-doors bloom. A chance dab with a white napkin comes away
+  like fresh paint, however.</P>
+
+  <P>You clamber back into the compartment, with its latticed sun
+  shades and its smoked glass windows; you let down the narrow
+  canvas bunk; you unfold your rug, and settle yourself for repose.
+  It is a difficult matter. Everything you touch is gritty. The air
+  is close and stifling, like the smoke-charged air of a tunnel. If
+  you try to open a window you are suffocated with more of the red
+  dust. At last you fall into a doze; to awaken nearly frozen! The
+  train has climbed into what is, after weeks of the tropics,
+  comparative cold; and if you have not been warned to carry wraps,
+  you are in danger of pneumonia.</P>
+
+  <P>The gray dawn comes, and shortly, in the sudden tropical
+  fashion, the full light. You look out on a wide smiling grass
+  country, with dips and swales, and brushy river bottoms, and long
+  slopes and hills thrusting up in masses from down below the
+  horizon, and singly here and there in the immensities nearer at
+  hand. The train winds and doubles on itself up the gentle slopes
+  and across the imperceptibly rising plains. But the interest is
+  not in these wide prospects, beautiful and smiling as they may
+  be, but in the game. It is everywhere. Far in the distance the
+  herds twinkle, half guessed in the shimmer of the bottom lands or
+  dotting the sides of the hills. Nearer at hand it stares as the
+  train rumbles and sways laboriously past. Occasionally it even
+  becomes necessary to whistle aside some impertinent kongoni that
+  has placed himself between the metals! The newcomer has but a
+  theoretical knowledge at best of all these animals; and he is
+  intensely interested in identifying the various species. The
+  hartebeeste and the wildebeeste he learns quickly enough, and of
+  course the zebra and the giraffe are unmistakable; but the
+  smaller gazelles are legitimate subjects for discussion. The
+  wonder of the extraordinary abundance of these wild animals
+  mounts as the hours slip by. At the stops for water or for orders
+  the passengers gather from their different compartments to detail
+  excitedly to each other what they have seen. There is always an
+  honest superenthusiast who believes he has seen rhinoceroses,
+  lions, or leopards. He is looked upon with envy by the credulous,
+  and with exasperation by all others.</P>
+
+  <P>So the little train puffs and tugs along. Suddenly it happens
+  on a barbed wire fence, and immediately after enters the town of
+  Nairobi. The game has persisted right up to that barbed wire
+  fence.</P>
+
+  <P>The station platform is thronged with a heterogeneous
+  multitude of people. The hands of a dozen raggetty black boys are
+  stretched out for luggage. The newcomer sees with delight a
+  savage with a tin can in his stretched ear lobe; another with a
+  set of wooden skewers set fanwise around the edge of the ear; he
+  catches a glimpse of a beautiful naked creature very proud, very
+  decorated with beads and heavy polished wire. Then he is ravished
+  away by the friend, or agent, or hotel representative who has met
+  him, and hurried out through the gates between the impassive and
+  dignified Sikh sentries to the cab. I believe nobody but the
+  newcomer ever rides in the cab; and then but once, from the
+  station to the hotel. After that he uses rickshaws. In fact it is
+  probable that the cab is maintained for the sole purpose of
+  giving the newcomer a grand and impressive entrance. This brief
+  fleeting quarter hour of glory is unique and passes. It is like
+  crossing the Line, or the first kiss, something that in its
+  nature cannot be repeated.</P>
+
+  <P>The cab was once a noble vehicle, compounded of opulent
+  curves, with a very high driver's box in front, a little let-down
+  bench, and a deep, luxurious, shell-shaped back seat, reclining
+  in which one received the adulation of the populace. That was in
+  its youth. Now in its age the varnish is gone; the upholstery of
+  the back seat frayed; the upholstery of the small seat lacking
+  utterly, so that one sits on bare boards. In place of two
+  dignifiedly spirited fat white horses, it is drawn by two very
+  small mules in a semi-detached position far ahead. And how it
+  rattles!</P>
+
+  <P>Between the station and the hotel at Nairobi is a long
+  straight wide well-made street, nearly a mile long, and bordered
+  by a double row of young eucalyptus. These latter have changed
+  the main street of Nairobi from the sunbaked array of galvanized
+  houses described by travellers of a half dozen years back to a
+  thoroughfare of great charm. The iron houses and stores are now
+  in a shaded background; and the attention is freed to concentrate
+  on the vivid colouring, the incessant movement, the great
+  interest of the people moving to and fro. When I left Nairobi the
+  authorities were considering the removal of these trees, because
+  one row of them had been planted slightly within the legal limits
+  of the street. What they could interfere with in a practically
+  horseless town I cannot imagine, but I trust this stupidity gave
+  way to second thought.</P>
+
+  <P>The cab rattles and careers up the length of the street,
+  scattering rickshaws and pedestrians from before its triumphant
+  path. To the left opens a wide street of little booths under iron
+  awnings, hung with gay colour and glittering things. The street
+  is thronged from side to side with natives of all sorts. It
+  whirls past, and shortly after the cab dashes inside a fence and
+  draws up before the low stone-built, wide-verandahed hotel.</P>
+
+  <P>FOOTNOTES:</P><A name='Footnote_5_5' id=
+  "Footnote_5_5"></A><A href='#FNanchor_5_5'>[5]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>The Government does much nowadays by means of tank cars.</P>
+  </DIV>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XIV' id="XIV"></A>
+
+  <H2>XIV.</H2>
+
+  <P>A TOWN OF CONTRASTS.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>It has been, as I have said, the fashion to speak of Nairobi
+  as an ugly little town. This was probably true when the first
+  corrugated iron houses huddled unrelieved near the railway
+  station. It is not true now. The lower part of town is well
+  planted, and is always picturesque as long as its people are
+  astir. The white population have built in the wooded hills some
+  charming bungalows surrounded by bright flowers or lost amid the
+  trunks of great trees. From the heights on which is Government
+  House one can, with a glass, watch the game herds feeding on the
+  plains. Two clubs, with the usual games of golf, polo,
+  tennis&mdash;especially tennis&mdash;football and cricket; a
+  weekly hunt, with jackals instead of foxes; a bungalow town club
+  on the slope of a hill; an electric light system; a race track; a
+  rifle range; frilly parasols and the latest fluffiest summer
+  toilettes from London and Paris&mdash;I mention a few of the
+  refinements of civilization that offer to the traveller some of
+  the most piquant of contrasts.</P>
+
+  <P>For it must not be forgotten that Nairobi, in spite of these
+  things&mdash;due to the direct but slender thread of
+  communication by railroad and ships&mdash;is actually in the
+  middle of an African wilderness&mdash;is a black man's town, as
+  far as numbers go.<A name='FNanchor_6_6' id=
+  "FNanchor_6_6"></A><A href='#Footnote_6_6'><SUP>[6]</SUP></A></P>
+
+  <P>The game feeds to its very outskirts, even wanders into the
+  streets at night.<A name='FNanchor_7_7' id=
+  "FNanchor_7_7"></A><A href='#Footnote_7_7'><SUP>[7]</SUP></A>
+  Lions may be heard roaring within a mile or so of town; and
+  leopards occasionally at night come on the verandas of the
+  outlying dwellings. Naked savages from the jungle untouched by
+  civilization in even the minutest particular wander the streets
+  unabashed.</P>
+
+  <P>It is this constantly recurring, sharply drawn contrast that
+  gives Nairobi its piquant charm. As one sits on the broad hotel
+  veranda a constantly varied pageant passes before him. A daintily
+  dressed, fresh-faced Englishwoman bobs by in a smart rickshaw
+  drawn by two uniformed runners; a Kikuyu, anointed, curled,
+  naked, brass adorned, teeters along, an expression of
+  satisfaction on his face; a horseman, well appointed, trots
+  briskly by followed by his loping syce; a string of skin-clad
+  women, their heads fantastically shaved, heavily ornamented, lean
+  forward under the burden of firewood for the market; a beautiful
+  baby in a frilled perambulator is propelled by a tall, solemn,
+  fine-looking black man in white robe and cap; the driver of a
+  high cart tools his animal past a creaking, clumsy, two-wheeled
+  wagon drawn by a pair of small humpbacked native oxen. And so it
+  goes, all day long, without end. The public rickshaw boys just
+  across the way chatter and game and quarrel and keep a watchful
+  eye out for a possible patron on whom to charge vociferously and
+  full tilt. Two or three old-timers with white whiskers and red
+  faces continue to slaughter thousands and thousands and thousands
+  of lions from the depths of their easy chairs.</P>
+
+  <P>The stone veranda of that hotel is a very interesting place.
+  Here gather men from all parts of East Africa, from Uganda, and
+  the jungles of the Upper Congo. At one time or another all the
+  famous hunters drop into its canvas chairs&mdash;Cunninghame,
+  Allan Black, Judd, Outram, Hoey, and the others; white traders
+  with the natives of distant lands; owners of farms experimenting
+  bravely on a greater or lesser scale in a land whose difficulties
+  are just beginning to be understood; great naturalists and
+  scientists from the governments of the earth, eager to observe
+  and collect this interesting and teeming fauna; and sportsmen
+  just out and full of interest, or just returned and modestly
+  important. More absorbing conversation can be listened to on this
+  veranda than in any other one place in the world. The gathering
+  is cosmopolitan; it is representative of the most active of every
+  social, political, and racial element; it has done things; it
+  contemplates vital problems from the vantage ground of
+  experience. The talk veers from pole to pole&mdash;and returns
+  always to lions.</P>
+
+  <P>Every little while a native&mdash;a raw savage&mdash;comes
+  along and takes up a stand just outside the railing. He stands
+  there mute and patient for five minutes&mdash;a half
+  hour&mdash;until some one, any one, happens to notice him.</P>
+
+  <P>"N'jo!&mdash;come here!" commands this person.</P>
+
+  <P>The savage silently proffers a bit of paper on which is
+  written the name of the one with whom he has business.</P>
+
+  <P>"Nenda officie!" indicates the charitable person waving his
+  hand towards the hotel office.</P>
+
+  <P>Then, and not until this permission has been given by some
+  one, dares the savage cross the threshold to do his errand.</P>
+
+  <P>If the messenger happens to be a trained houseboy, however,
+  dressed in his uniform of khaki or his more picturesque white
+  robe and cap, he is privileged to work out his own salvation. And
+  behind the hotel are rows and rows of other boys, each waiting
+  patiently the pleasure of his especial bwana lounging at ease
+  after strenuous days. At the drawling shout of "boy!" one of them
+  instantly departs to find out which particular boy is wanted.</P>
+
+  <P>The moment any white man walks to the edge of the veranda a
+  half-dozen of the rickshaws across the street career madly around
+  the corners of the fence, bumping, colliding, careening
+  dangerously, to drop beseechingly in serried confusion close
+  around the step. The rickshaw habit is very strong in Nairobi. If
+  a man wants to go a hundred yards down the street he takes a
+  rickshaw for that stupendous journey. There is in justification
+  the legend that the white man should not exert himself in the
+  tropics. I fell into the custom of the country until I reflected
+  that it would hardly be more fatal to me to walk a half-hour in
+  the streets of Nairobi than to march six or seven hours&mdash;as
+  I often did&mdash;when on safari or in the hunting field. After
+  that I got a little exercise, to the vast scandal of the rickshaw
+  boys. In fact, so unusual was my performance that at first I had
+  fairly to clear myself a way with my kiboko. After a few
+  experiences they concluded me a particularly crazy person and let
+  me alone.</P>
+
+  <P>Rickshaws, however, are very efficient and very cheap. The
+  runners, two in number, are lithe little round-headed Kavirondos,
+  generally, their heads shaved to leave a skull cap, clad in scant
+  ragged garments, and wearing each an anklet of little bells.
+  Their passion for ornament they confine to small bright things in
+  their hair and ears. They run easily, with a very long stride.
+  Even steep hills they struggle up somehow, zigzagging from one
+  side of the road to the other, edging along an inch or so at a
+  time. In such places I should infinitely have preferred to have
+  walked, but that would have lost me caste everywhere. There are
+  limits even to a crazy man's idiosyncrasies. For that reason I
+  never thoroughly enjoyed rickshaws, save along the level ways
+  with bells jingling and feet patpatting a rapid time. Certainly I
+  did not enjoy them going down the steep hills. The boy between
+  the shafts in front hits the landscape about every forty feet. I
+  do not really object to sudden death, but this form of it seemed
+  unfair to some poor hungry lion.</P>
+
+  <P>However, the winding smooth roads among the forested, shaded
+  bungalows of the upper part of town were very attractive,
+  especially towards evening. At that time the universal sun-helmet
+  or double terai could be laid aside for straw hats, cloth caps,
+  or bare heads. People played the more violent games, or strolled
+  idly. At the hotel there was now a good deal of foolish drinking;
+  foolish, because in this climate it is very bad for the human
+  system, and in these surroundings of much interest and excitement
+  the relief of its exaltation from monotony or ennui or routine
+  could hardly be required.</P>
+
+  <P>FOOTNOTES:</P><A name='Footnote_6_6' id=
+  "Footnote_6_6"></A><A href='#FNanchor_6_6'>[6]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>Fifteen hundred whites to twelve thousand natives,
+    approximately.</P>
+  </DIV><A name='Footnote_7_7' id="Footnote_7_7"></A><A href=
+  '#FNanchor_7_7'>[7]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>This happened twice while I was in the country.</P>
+  </DIV>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XV' id="XV"></A>
+
+  <H2>XV.</H2>
+
+  <P>PEOPLE.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>Considered as a class rather than as individuals, the
+  dark-skinned population is easily the more interesting.
+  Considered as individuals, the converse is true. Men like Sir
+  Percy Girouard, Hobley, Jackson, Lord Delamere, McMillan,
+  Cunninghame, Allan Black, Leslie Tarleton, Vanderweyer, the Hill
+  cousins, Horne, and a dozen others are nowhere else to be met in
+  so small a community. But the whites have developed nothing in
+  their relations one to another essentially different. The artisan
+  and shopkeeping class dwell on the flats; the Government people
+  and those of military connections live on the heights on one side
+  of the little stream; the civil service and bigger business men
+  among the hills on the other. Between them all is a little
+  jealousy, and contempt, and condescension; just as there is
+  jealousy, and contempt, and condescension elsewhere. They are
+  pleasant people, and hospitable, and some of them very
+  distinguished in position or achievement; and I am glad to say I
+  have good friends among them.</P>
+
+  <P>But the native is the joy, and the never-ceasing delight. For
+  his benefit is the wide, glittering, colourful, insanitary
+  bazaar, with its dozens of little open-air veranda shops, its
+  "hotels" where he can sit in a real chair and drink real tea, its
+  cafes, and the dark mysteries of its more doubtful amusements.
+  The bazaar is right in the middle of town, just where it ought
+  not to be, and it is constantly being quarantined, and threatened
+  with removal. It houses a large population mysteriously, for it
+  is of slight extent. Then on the borders of town are the two
+  great native villages&mdash;one belonging to the Somalis, and the
+  other hospitably accommodating the swarms of caravan porters and
+  their families. For, just as in old days Mombasa and Zanzibar
+  used to be the points from which caravans into the interior would
+  set forth, now Nairobi outfits the majority of expeditions.
+  Probably ten thousand picked natives of various tribes are
+  engaged in the profession. Of course but a small proportion of
+  this number is ever at home at any one time; but the village is a
+  large one. Both these villages are built in the native style, of
+  plaster and thatch; have their own headman government&mdash;under
+  supervision&mdash;and are kept pretty well swept out and tidy.
+  Besides these three main gathering places are many camps and
+  "shambas"<A name='FNanchor_8_8' id="FNanchor_8_8"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_8_8'><SUP>[8]</SUP></A> scattered everywhere; and the
+  back country counts millions of raw jungle savages, only too glad
+  to drift in occasionally for a look at the metropolis.</P>
+
+  <P>At first the newcomer is absolutely bewildered by the variety
+  of these peoples; but after a little he learns to differentiate.
+  The Somalis are perhaps the first recognizable, with their finely
+  chiselled, intelligent, delicate brown features, their slender
+  forms, and their strikingly picturesque costumes of turbans,
+  flowing robes, and embroidered sleeveless jackets. Then he learns
+  to distinguish the savage from the sophisticated dweller of the
+  town. Later comes the identification of the numerous tribes.</P>
+
+  <P>The savage comes in just as he has been for, ethnologists
+  alone can guess, how many thousands of years. He is too old an
+  institution to have been affected as yet by this tiny spot of
+  modernity in the middle of the wilderness. As a consequence he
+  startles the newcomer even more than the sight of giraffes on the
+  sky-line.</P>
+
+  <P>When the shenzi&mdash;wild man&mdash;comes to town he gathers
+  in two or three of his companions, and presents himself as
+  follows: His hair has been grown quite long, then gathered in
+  three tight pigtails wound with leather, one of which hangs over
+  his forehead, and the other two over his ears. The entire head he
+  has then anointed with a mixture of castor oil and a bright red
+  colouring earth. This is wiped away evenly all around the face,
+  about two inches below the hair, to leave a broad, bandlike
+  glistening effect around the entire head. The ears are most
+  marvellous. From early youth the lobes have been stretched, until
+  at last they have become like two long elastic loops, hanging
+  down upon the shoulder, and capable of accommodating anything up
+  to and including a tomato can. When in fatigue uniform these
+  loops are caught up over the tops of the ears, but on dress
+  parade they accommodate almost anything considered ornamental. I
+  have seen a row of safety pins clasped in them or a number of
+  curtain rings; or a marmalade jar, or the glittering cover of a
+  tobacco tin. The edges of the ears, all around to the top, are
+  then pierced. Then the insertion of a row of long white wooden
+  skewers gives one a peculiarly porcupinish look; or a row of
+  little brass danglers hints of wealth. Having thus finished off
+  his head, your savage clasps around his neck various strings of
+  beads; or collars of iron or copper wire, polished to the point
+  of glitter; puts on a half-dozen armlets and leglets of the same;
+  ties on a narrow bead belt, in which is thrust a short sword;
+  anoints himself all over with reddened castor oil until he
+  glistens and shines in the sun; rubs his legs with white clay and
+  traces patterns therein; seizes his long-bladed spear, and is
+  ready for the city. Oh, no! I forgot&mdash;and he probably came
+  near doing so&mdash;his strip of 'Mericani.<A name='FNanchor_9_9'
+  id="FNanchor_9_9"></A><A href='#Footnote_9_9'><SUP>[9]</SUP></A>
+  This was originally white, but constant wear over castor oil has
+  turned it a uniform and beautiful brown.</P>
+
+  <P>The purpose of this is ornament, and it is so worn. There has
+  been an attempt, I understand, to force these innocent children
+  to some sort of conventional decency while actually in the
+  streets of Nairobi. It was too large an order. Some bring in
+  clothes, to be sure, because the white man asks it; but why no
+  sensible man could say. They are hung from one shoulder, flap
+  merrily in the breeze, and are always quite frankly tucked up
+  about the neck or under the arms when the wearer happens to be in
+  haste. As a matter of fact these savages are so beautifully and
+  smoothly formed; their red-brown or chocolate-brown skin is so
+  fine in texture, and their complete unconsciousness so genuine
+  that in an hour the newcomer is quite accustomed to their
+  nakedness.</P>
+
+  <P>These proud youths wander mincingly down the street with an
+  expression of the most fatuous and good-natured satisfaction with
+  themselves. To their minds they have evidently done every last
+  thing that human ingenuity or convention could encompass.</P>
+
+  <P>These young men are the dandies, the proud young aristocracy
+  of wealth and importance; and of course they may differ
+  individually or tribally from the sample I have offered. Also
+  there are many other social grades. Those who care less for dress
+  or have less to get it with can rub along very cheaply. The only
+  real essentials are (<I>a</I>) something for the ear&mdash;a
+  tomato can will do; (<I>b</I>) a trifle for clothing&mdash;and
+  for that a scrap of gunny sacking will be quite enough.</P>
+
+  <P>The women to be seen in the streets of Nairobi are mostly of
+  the Kikuyu tribe. They are pretty much of a pattern. Their heads
+  are shaven, either completely or to leave only ornamental tufts;
+  and are generally bound with a fine wire fillet so tightly that
+  the strands seem to sink into the flesh. A piece of cotton cloth,
+  dyed dark umber red, is belted around the waist, and sometimes,
+  but not always, another is thrown about the shoulder. They go in
+  for more hardware than do the men. The entire arms and the calves
+  of the legs are encased in a sort of armour made of quarter-inch
+  wire wound closely, and a collar of the same material stands out
+  like a ruff eight or ten inches around the neck. This is wound on
+  for good; and must be worn day and night and all the time, a
+  cumbersome and tremendously heavy burden. A dozen large loops of
+  coloured beads strung through the ears, and various strings and
+  necklaces of beads, cowrie shells, and the like finish them out
+  in all their gorgeousness. They would sink like plummets. Their
+  job in life, besides lugging all this stuff about, is to carry in
+  firewood and forage. At any time of the day long files of them
+  can be seen bending forward under their burdens. These they carry
+  on their backs by means of a strap across the tops of their
+  heads; after the fashion of the Canadian tump line.</P>
+
+  <P>The next cut above the shenzi, or wild man, is the individual
+  who has been on safari as carrier, or has otherwise been much
+  employed around white men. From this experience he has acquired
+  articles of apparel and points of view. He is given to ragged
+  khaki, or cast-off garments of all sorts, but never to shoes.
+  This hint of the conventional only serves to accent the little
+  self-satisfied excursions he makes into barbarism. The shirt is
+  always worn outside, the ear ornaments are as varied as ever, the
+  head is shaved in strange patterns, a tiny tight tuft on the
+  crown is useful as fastening for feathers or little streamers or
+  anything else that will wave or glitter. One of these individuals
+  wore a red label he had, with patience and difficulty, removed
+  from one of our trunks. He had pasted it on his forehead; and it
+  read "Baggage Room. Not Wanted." These people are, after all, but
+  modified shenzis. The modification is nearly always in the
+  direction of the comic.</P>
+
+  <P>Now we step up to a class that would resent being called
+  shenzis as it would resent an insult. This is the personal
+  servant class. The members are of all tribes, with possibly a
+  slight preponderance of Swahilis and Somalis. They are a very
+  clean, well-groomed, self-respecting class, with a great deal of
+  dignity, and a great deal of pride in their bwanas. Also they are
+  exceedingly likely to degenerate unless ruled with a firm hand
+  and a wise head. Very rarely are they dishonest as respects the
+  possessions of their own masters. They understand their work
+  perfectly, and the best of them get the equivalent of from eight
+  to ten dollars a month. Every white individual has one or more of
+  them; even the tiny children with their ridiculous little sun
+  helmets are followed everywhere by a tall, solemn, white-robed
+  black. Their powers of divination approach the uncanny. About the
+  time you begin to think of wanting something, and are making a
+  first helpless survey of a boyless landscape, your own servant
+  suddenly, mysteriously, and unobtrusively appears from nowhere.
+  Where he keeps himself, where he feeds himself, where he sleeps
+  you do not know. These beautifully clean, trim, dignified people
+  are always a pleasant feature in the varied picture.</P>
+
+  <P>The Somalis are a clan by themselves. A few of them condescend
+  to domestic service, but the most prefer the free life of
+  traders, horse dealers, gunbearers, camel drivers, labour
+  go-betweens, and similar guerrilla occupations. They are
+  handsome, dashing, proud, treacherous, courageous, likeable,
+  untrustworthy. They career around on their high, short-stirruped
+  saddles; they saunter indolently in small groups; they hang about
+  the hotel hoping for a dicker of some kind. There is nothing of
+  the savage about them, but much of the true barbarism, with the
+  barbarian's pride, treachery, and love of colour.</P>
+
+  <P>FOOTNOTES:</P><A name='Footnote_8_8' id=
+  "Footnote_8_8"></A><A href='#FNanchor_8_8'>[8]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>Native farmlets, generally temporary.</P>
+  </DIV><A name='Footnote_9_9' id="Footnote_9_9"></A><A href=
+  '#FNanchor_9_9'>[9]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>White cotton cloth.</P>
+  </DIV>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XVI' id="XVI"></A>
+
+  <H2>XVI.</H2>
+
+  <P>RECRUITING.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>To the traveller Nairobi is most interesting as the point from
+  which expeditions start and to which they return. Doubtless an
+  extended stay in the country would show him that problems of
+  administration and possibilities of development could be even
+  more absorbing; but such things are very sketchy to him at
+  first.</P>
+
+  <P>As a usual thing, when he wants porters he picks them out from
+  the throng hanging around the big outfitters' establishments.
+  Each man is then given a blanket&mdash;cotton, but of a most
+  satisfying red&mdash;a tin water bottle, a short stout cord, and
+  a navy blue jersey. After that ceremony he is yours.</P>
+
+  <P>But on the occasion of one three months' journey into
+  comparatively unknown country we ran up against difficulties.
+  Some two weeks before our contemplated start two or three cases
+  of bubonic plague had been discovered in the bazaar, and as a
+  consequence Nairobi was quarantined. This meant that a rope had
+  been stretched around the infected area, that the shops had been
+  closed, and that no native could&mdash;officially&mdash;leave
+  Nairobi. The latter provision affected us; for under it we should
+  be unable to get our bearers out.</P>
+
+  <P>As a matter of fact, the whole
+  performance&mdash;unofficially&mdash;was a farce. Natives
+  conversed affably at arm's length across the ropes; hundreds
+  sneaked in and out of town at will; and from the rear of the
+  infected area I personally saw beds, chests, household goods,
+  blankets, and clothes passed to friends outside the ropes. When
+  this latter condition was reported, in my presence, to the
+  medical officers, they replied that this was a matter for police
+  cognizance! But the brave outward show of ropes, disinfectants,
+  gorgeous sentries&mdash;in front&mdash;and official inspection
+  went solemnly on. Great, even in Africa, is the god of red
+  tape.</P>
+
+  <P>Our only possible plan, in the circumstances, was to recruit
+  the men outside the town, to camp them somewhere, march them
+  across country to a way station, and there embark them. Our goods
+  and safari stores we could then ship out to them by train.</P>
+
+  <P>Accordingly we rode on bicycles out to the Swahili
+  village.</P>
+
+  <P>This is, as I have said, composed of large "beehive" houses
+  thatched conically with straw. The roofs extend to form verandas
+  beneath which sit indolent damsels, their hair divided in
+  innumerable tiny parts running fore and aft like the stripes on a
+  water melon; their figured 'Mericani garments draped gracefully.
+  As befitted the women of plutocrats, they wore much jewellery,
+  some of it set in their noses. Most of them did all of nothing,
+  but some sat half buried in narrow strips of bright-coloured
+  tissue paper. These they were pasting together like rolls of
+  tape, the coloured edges of the paper forming concentric patterns
+  on the resultant discs&mdash;an infinite labour. The discs, when
+  completed, were for insertion in the lobes of the ears.</P>
+
+  <P>When we arrived the irregular "streets" of the village were
+  nearly empty, save for a few elegant youths, in long kanzuas, or
+  robes of cinnamon colour and spotless white, on their heads
+  fezzes or turbans, in their hands slender rattan canes. They were
+  very busy talking to each other, and of course did not notice the
+  idle beauties beneath the verandas.</P>
+
+  <P>Hardly had we appeared, however, when mysteriously came forth
+  the headman&mdash;a bearded, solemn, Arab-like person with a
+  phenomenally ugly face but a most pleasing smile. We told him we
+  wanted porters. He clapped his hands. To the four young men who
+  answered this summons he gave a command. From sleepy indolence
+  they sprang into life. To the four cardinal points of the compass
+  they darted away, running up and down the side streets, beating
+  on the doors, screaming at the tops of their lungs the word
+  "Cazi"<A name='FNanchor_10_10' id="FNanchor_10_10"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_10_10'><SUP>[10]</SUP></A> over and over again.</P>
+
+  <P>The village hummed like a wasps' nest. Men poured from the
+  huts in swarms. The streets were filled; the idle sauntering
+  youths were swamped, and sunk from view. Clamour and shouting
+  arose where before had been a droning silence. The mob beat up to
+  where we stood, surrounding us, shouting at us. From somewhere
+  some one brought an old table and two decrepit chairs, battered
+  and rickety in themselves, but symbols of great authority in a
+  community where nobody habitually used either. Two naked boys
+  proudly took charge of our bicycles.</P>
+
+  <P>We seated ourselves.</P>
+
+  <P>"Fall in!" we yelled.</P>
+
+  <P>About half the crowd fell into rough lines. The rest drew
+  slightly to one side. Nobody stopped talking for a single
+  instant.</P>
+
+  <P>We arose and tackled our job. The first part of it was to
+  segregate the applicants into their different tribes.</P>
+
+  <P>"Monumwezi hapa!" we yelled; and the command was repeated and
+  repeated again by the headman, by his four personal assistants,
+  by a half-dozen lesser headmen. Slowly the Monumwezi drew aside.
+  We impressed on them emphatically they must stay thus, and went
+  after, in turn, the Baganda, the Wakamba, the Swahilis, the
+  Kavirondo, the Kikuyu. When we had them grouped, we went over
+  them individually. We punched their chests, we ran over all their
+  joints, we examined their feet, we felt their muscles. Our
+  victims stood rigidly at inspection, but their numerous friends
+  surrounded us closely, urging the claims of the man to our
+  notice. It was rather confusing, but we tried to go at it as
+  though we were alone in a wilderness. If the man passed muster we
+  motioned him to a rapidly growing group.</P>
+
+  <P>When we had finished we had about sixty men segregated. Then
+  we went over this picked lot again. This time we tried not only
+  to get good specimens, but to mix our tribes. At last our count
+  of twenty-nine was made up, and we took a deep breath. But to us
+  came one of them complaining that he was a Monumwezi, and that we
+  had picked only three Monumwezi, and&mdash;We cut him short. His
+  contention was quite correct. A porter tent holds five, and it
+  does not do to mix tribes. Reorganization! Cut out two extra
+  Kavirondos, and include two more Monumwezi. "Bass! finished! Now
+  go get your effects. We start immediately."</P>
+
+  <P>As quickly as it had filled, the street cleared. The rejected
+  dived back into their huts, the newly enlisted carriers went to
+  collect their baggage. Only remained the headman and his
+  fierce-faced assistants, and the splendid youths idling up and
+  down&mdash;none of them had volunteered, you may be
+  sure&mdash;and the damsels of leisure beneath the porticos. Also
+  one engaging and peculiar figure hovering near.</P>
+
+  <P>This individual had been particularly busy during our
+  recruiting. He had hustled the men into line, he had advised us
+  for or against different candidates, he had loudly sung my
+  praises as a man to work for, although, of course, he knew
+  nothing about me. Now he approached, saluted, smiled. He was a
+  tall, slenderly-built person, with phenomenally long, thin legs,
+  slightly rounded shoulders, a forward thrust, keen face, and
+  remarkably long, slim hands. With these he gesticulated much, in
+  a right-angled fashion, after the manner of Egyptian
+  hieroglyphical figures. He was in no manner shenzi. He wore a
+  fez, a neat khaki coat and shorts, blue puttees and boots. Also a
+  belt with leather pockets, a bunch of keys, a wrist watch, and a
+  seal ring. His air was of great elegance and social ease. We took
+  him with us as C.'s gunbearer. He proved staunch, a good tracker,
+  an excellent hunter, and a most engaging individual. His name was
+  Kongoni, and he was a Wakamba.</P>
+
+  <P>But now we were confronted with a new problem: that of getting
+  our twenty-nine chosen ones together again. They had totally
+  disappeared. In all directions we had emissaries beating up the
+  laggards. As each man reappeared carrying his little bundle, we
+  lined him up with his companions. Then when we turned our backs
+  we lost him again; he had thought of another friend with whom to
+  exchange farewells. At the long last, however, we got them all
+  collected. The procession started, the naked boys proudly
+  wheeling our bikes alongside. We saw them fairly clear of
+  everything, then turned them over to Kongoni, while we returned
+  to Nairobi to see after our effects.</P>
+
+  <P>FOOTNOTES:</P><A name='Footnote_10_10' id=
+  "Footnote_10_10"></A><A href='#FNanchor_10_10'>[10]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>Work.</P>
+  </DIV>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='PART_IV' id="PART_IV"></A>
+
+  <H2>PART IV. A LION HUNT ON KAPITI.</H2>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XVII' id="XVII"></A>
+
+  <H2>XVII.</H2>
+
+  <P>AN OSTRICH FARM AT MACHAKOS.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>This has to do with a lion hunt on the Kapiti Plains. On the
+  veranda at Nairobi I had some time previous met Clifford Hill,
+  who had invited me to visit him at the ostrich farm he and his
+  cousin were running in the mountains near Machakos. Some time
+  later, a visit to Juja Farm gave me the opportunity. Juja is only
+  a day's ride from the Hills'. So an Africander, originally from
+  the south, Captain D., and I sent across a few carriers with our
+  personal effects, and ourselves rode over on horseback.</P>
+
+  <P>Juja is on the Athi Plains. Between the Athi and Kapiti Plains
+  runs a range of low mountains around the end of which one can
+  make his way as around a promontory. The Hills' ostrich farm was
+  on the highlands in the bay on the other side of the
+  promontory.</P>
+
+  <P>It was towards the close of the rainy season, and the rivers
+  were up. We had to swim our horses within a half-mile of Juja,
+  and got pretty wet. Shortly after crossing the Athi, however,
+  five miles on, we emerged on the dry, drained slopes from the
+  hills. Here the grass was long, and the ticks plentiful. Our
+  horses' legs and chests were black with them; and when we
+  dismounted for lunch we ourselves were almost immediately alive
+  with the pests. In this very high grass the game was rather
+  scarce, but after we had climbed by insensible grades to the
+  shorter growth we began to see many hartebeeste, zebra, and
+  gazelles, and a few of the wildebeeste, or brindled gnus. Travel
+  over these great plains and through these leisurely low hills is
+  a good deal like coastwise sailing&mdash;the same apparently
+  unattainable landmarks which, nevertheless, are at last passed
+  and left astern by the same sure but insensible progress. Thus we
+  drew up on apparently continuous hills, found wide gaps between
+  them, crossed them, and turned to the left along the other side
+  of the promontory. About five o'clock we came to the Hills'.</P>
+
+  <P>The ostrich farm is situated on the very top of a conical rise
+  that sticks up like an island close inshore to the semicircle of
+  mountains in which end the vast plains of Kapiti. Thus the Hills
+  have at their backs and sides these solid ramparts and face
+  westward the immensities of space. For Kapiti goes on over the
+  edge of the world to unknown, unguessed regions, rolling and
+  troubled like a sea. And from that unknown, on very still days,
+  the snowy peak of Kilimanjaro peers out, sketched as faintly
+  against the sky as a soap bubble wafted upward and about to
+  disappear. Here and there on the plains kopjes stand like
+  islands, their stone tops looking as though thrust through the
+  smooth prairie surface from beneath. To them meandered long,
+  narrow ravines full of low brush, like thin, wavering streaks of
+  gray. On these kopjes&mdash;each of which had its name&mdash;and
+  in these ravines we were to hunt lions.</P>
+
+  <P>We began the ascent of the cone on which dwelt our hosts. It
+  was one of those hills that seem in no part steep, and yet which
+  finally succeed in raising one to a considerable height. We
+  passed two ostrich herds in charge of savages, rode through a
+  scattered native village, and so came to the farm itself,
+  situated on the very summit.</P>
+
+  <P>The house consisted of three large circular huts, thatched
+  neatly with papyrus stalks, and with conical roofs. These were
+  arranged as a triangle, just touching each other; and the space
+  between had been roofed over to form a veranda. We were ushered
+  into one of these circular rooms. It was spacious and contained
+  two beds, two chairs, a dresser, and a table. Its earth floor was
+  completely covered by the skins of animals. In the corresponding
+  room, opposite, slept our hosts; while the third was the living
+  and dining room. A long table, raw-hide bottomed chairs, a large
+  sideboard, bookcases, a long easy settee with pillows, gun racks,
+  photographs in and out of frames, a table with writing materials,
+  and books and magazines everywhere&mdash;not to speak of again
+  the skins of many animals completely covering the floor. Out
+  behind, in small, separate buildings, laboured the cook, and
+  dwelt the stores, the bath-tub, and other such necessary
+  affairs.</P>
+
+  <P>As soon as we had consumed the usual grateful lime juice and
+  sparklets, we followed our hosts into the open air to look
+  around.</P>
+
+  <P>On this high, airy hill top the Hills some day are going to
+  build them a real house. In anticipation they have laid out
+  grounds and have planted many things. In examining these my
+  California training stood by me. Out there, as here, one so often
+  examines his own and his neighbours' gardens, not for what they
+  are but for what they shall become. His imagination can exalt
+  this tiny seedling to the impressiveness of spreading noontime
+  shade; can magnify yonder apparent duplicate to the full symmetry
+  of a shrub; can ruthlessly diminish the present importance of
+  certain grand and lofty growths to its true status of flower or
+  animal. So from a dead uniformity of size he casts forward in the
+  years to a pleasing variation of shade, of jungle, of open glade,
+  of flowered vista; and he goes away full of expert admiration for
+  "X.'s bully garden." With this solid training beneath me I was
+  able on this occasion to please immensely.</P>
+
+  <P>From the house site we descended the slope to where the
+  ostriches and the cattle and the people were in the late sunlight
+  swarming upward from the plains pastures below. These people
+  were, to the chief extent, Wakamba, quite savage, but attracted
+  here by the justness and fair dealing of the Hills. Some of them
+  farmed on shares with the Hills, the white men furnishing the
+  land and seed, and the black men the labour; some of them
+  laboured on wage; some few herded cattle or ostriches; some were
+  hunters and took the field only when, as now, serious business
+  was afoot. They had their complete villages, with priests, witch
+  doctors, and all; and they seemed both contented and fond of the
+  two white men.</P>
+
+  <P>As we walked about we learned much of the ostrich business;
+  and in the course of our ten days' visit we came to a better
+  realization of how much there is to think of in what appears
+  basically so simple a proposition.</P>
+
+  <P>In the nesting time, then, the Hills went out over the open
+  country, sometimes for days at a time, armed with long high-power
+  telescopes. With these fearsome and unwieldy instruments they
+  surveyed the country inch by inch from the advantage of a kopje.
+  When thus they discovered a nest, they descended and appropriated
+  the eggs. The latter, hatched at home in an incubator, formed the
+  nucleus of a flock.</P>
+
+  <P>Pass the raising of ostrich chicks to full size through the
+  difficulties of disease, wild beasts, and sheer cussedness. Of
+  the resultant thirty birds or so of the season's catch, but two
+  or three will even promise good production. These must be bred in
+  captivity with other likely specimens. Thus after several years
+  the industrious ostrich farmer may become possessed of a few
+  really prime birds. To accumulate a proper flock of such in a new
+  country is a matter of a decade or so. Extra prime birds are as
+  well known and as much in demand for breeding as any blood horse
+  in a racing country. Your true ostrich enthusiast, like the
+  Hills, possesses trunks full of feathers not good commercially,
+  but intensely interesting for comparison and for the purposes of
+  prophecy. While I stayed with them came a rumour of a very fine
+  plucking a distant neighbour had just finished from a likely
+  two-year-old. The Hills were manifestly uneasy until one of them
+  had ridden the long distance to compare this newcomer's product
+  with that of their own two-year-olds. And I shall never forget
+  the reluctantly admiring shake of the head with which he
+  acknowledged that it was indeed a "very fine feather!"</P>
+
+  <P>But getting the birds is by no means all of ostrich farming,
+  as many eager experimenters have discovered to their cost. The
+  birds must have a certain sort of pasture land; and their
+  paddocks must be built on an earth that will not soil or break
+  the edges of the new plumes.</P>
+
+  <P>And then there is the constant danger of wild beasts. When a
+  man has spent years in gathering suitable flocks, he cannot be
+  blamed for wild anger when, as happened while I was in the
+  country, lions kill sixty or seventy birds in a night. The
+  ostrich seems to tempt lions greatly. The beasts will make their
+  way through and over the most complicated defences. Any ostrich
+  farmer's life is a constant warfare against them. Thus the Hills
+  had slain sixty-eight lions in and near their farm&mdash;a
+  tremendous record. Still the beasts continued to come in. My
+  hosts showed me, with considerable pride, their arrangements
+  finally evolved for night protection.</P>
+
+  <P>The ostriches were confined in a series of heavy corrals,
+  segregating the birds of different ages. Around the outside of
+  this group of enclosures ran a wide ring corral in which were
+  confined the numerous cattle; and as an outer wall to this were
+  built the huts of the Wakamba village. Thus to penetrate to the
+  ostriches the enterprising lion would have to pass both the
+  people, the cattle, and the strong thorn and log structures that
+  contained them.</P>
+
+  <P>This subject brings me to another set of acquaintances we had
+  already made&mdash;the dogs.</P>
+
+  <P>These consisted of an Airedale named Ruby; two setters called
+  Wayward and Girlie; a heavy black mongrel, Nero; ditto brindle,
+  Ben; and a smaller black and white ditto, Ranger. They were very
+  nice friendly doggy dogs, but they did not look like lion
+  hunters. Nevertheless, Hill assured us that they were of great
+  use in the sport, and promised us that on the following day we
+  should see just how.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XVIII' id="XVIII"></A>
+
+  <H2>XVIII</H2>
+
+  <P>THE FIRST LIONESS.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>At an early hour we loaded our bedding, food, tents, and camp
+  outfit on a two-wheeled wagon drawn by four of the humpbacked
+  native oxen, and sent it away across the plains, with
+  instructions to make camp on a certain kopje. Clifford Hill and
+  myself, accompanied by our gunbearers and syces, then rode
+  leisurely down the length of a shallow brushy ca&ntilde;on for a
+  mile or so. There we dismounted and sat down to await the arrival
+  of the others. These&mdash;including Harold Hill, Captain D.,
+  five or six Wakamba spearmen, our own carriers, and the
+  dogs&mdash;came along more slowly, beating the bottoms on the off
+  chance of game.</P>
+
+  <P>The sun was just warming, and the bees and insects were
+  filling the air with their sleepy droning sounds. The hillside
+  opposite showed many little outcrops of rocks so like the hills
+  of our own Western States that it was somewhat difficult to
+  realize that we were in Africa. For some reason the delay was
+  long. Then suddenly all four of us simultaneously saw the same
+  thing. A quarter-mile away and on the hillside opposite a
+  magnificent lioness came loping easily along through the grass.
+  She looked very small at that distance, like a toy, and quite
+  unhurried. Indeed, every few moments she paused to look back in
+  an annoyed fashion over her shoulder in the direction of the row
+  behind her.</P>
+
+  <P>There was nothing to do but sit tight and wait. The lioness
+  was headed exactly to cross our front; nor, except at one point,
+  was she at all likely to deviate. A shallow tributary ravine ran
+  into our own about two hundred yards away. She might possibly
+  sneak down the bed of this. It seemed unlikely. The going was
+  bad, and in addition she had no idea as yet that she had been
+  sighted. Indeed, the chances were that she would come to a
+  definite stop before making the crossing, in which case we would
+  get a shot.</P>
+
+  <P>"And if she does go down the donga," whispered Hill, "the dogs
+  will locate her."</P>
+
+  <P>Sitting still while things approach is always exciting. This
+  is true of ducks; but when you multiply ducks by lions it is
+  still more true. We all crouched very low in the grass. She leapt
+  without hesitation into the ravine&mdash;and did not emerge.</P>
+
+  <P>This was a disappointment. We concluded she must have entered
+  the stream bottom, and were just about to move when Memba Sasa
+  snapped his fingers. His sharp eyes had discovered her sneaking
+  along, belly to the ground, like the cat she was. The explanation
+  of this change in her gait was simple. Our companions had rounded
+  the corner of the hill and were galloping in plain view a
+  half-mile away. The lioness had caught sight of them.</P>
+
+  <P>She was gliding by, dimly visible, through thick brush seventy
+  yards distant. Now I could make out a tawny patch that faded
+  while I looked; now I could merely guess at a melting shadow.</P>
+
+  <P>"Stir her up," whispered Hill. "Never mind whether you hit.
+  She'll sneak away."</P>
+
+  <P>At the shot she leaped fully out into the open with a snarl.
+  Promptly I planted a Springfield bullet in her ribs. She answered
+  slightly to the hit, but did not shift position. Her head up, her
+  tail thrashing from side to side, her ears laid back, she stood
+  there looking the landscape over carefully point by point. She
+  was searching for us, but as yet could not locate us. It was
+  really magnificent.</P>
+
+  <P>I attempted to throw in another cartridge, but because of my
+  desire to work the bolt quietly, in order not to attract the
+  lioness's attention, I did not pull it back far enough, and the
+  cartridge jammed in the magazine. As evidence of Memba Sasa's
+  coolness and efficiency, it is to be written that he became aware
+  of this as soon as I did. He thrust the.405 across my right side,
+  at the same time withdrawing the Springfield on the left. The
+  motion was slight, but the lioness caught it. Immediately she
+  dropped her head and charged.</P>
+
+  <P>For the next few moments, naturally, I was pretty intent on
+  lions. Nevertheless a corner of my mind was aware of Memba Sasa
+  methodically picking away at the jammed rifle, and paying no
+  attention whatever to the beast. Also I heard Hill making
+  picturesque remarks about his gunbearer, who had bolted with his
+  second gun.</P>
+
+  <P>The lioness charged very fast, but very straight, about in the
+  tearing, scrambling manner of a terrier after a thrown ball. I
+  got in the first shot as she came, the bullet ranging back from
+  the shoulder, and Hill followed it immediately with another from
+  his.404 Jeffrey. She growled at the bullets, and checked very
+  slightly as they hit, but gave no other sign. Then our second
+  shots hit her both together. The mere shock stopped her short,
+  but recovering instantly, she sprang forward again. Hill's third
+  shot came next, and perceptibly slowed and staggered, but did not
+  stop her. By this time she was quite close, and my own third shot
+  reached her brain. She rolled over dead.</P>
+
+  <P>Decidedly she was a game beast, and stood more hammering than
+  any other lion I killed or saw killed. Before the final shot in
+  the brain she had taken one light bullet and five heavy ones with
+  hardly a wince. Memba Sasa uttered a loud grunt of satisfaction
+  when she went down for good. He had the Springfield reloaded and
+  cocked, right at my elbow.</P>
+
+  <P>Hill's gunboy hovered uncertainly some distance in the rear.
+  The sight of the charging lioness had been too much for him and
+  he had bolted. He was not actually up a tree; but he stood very
+  near one. He lost the gun and acquired a swift kick.</P>
+
+  <P>Our friends and the men now came up. The dogs made a great row
+  over the dead lioness. She was measured and skinned to
+  accompaniment of the usual low-hummed chantings. We had with us a
+  small boy of ten or twelve years whose job it was to take care of
+  the dogs and to remove ticks. In fact he was known as the Tick
+  Toto. As this was his first expedition afield, his father took
+  especial pains to smear him with fat from the lioness. This was
+  to make him brave. I am bound to confess the effect was not
+  immediate.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XIX' id="XIX"></A>
+
+  <H2>XIX.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE DOGS.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>I soon discovered that we were hunting lions with the
+  assistance of the dogs; not that the dogs were hunting lions.
+  They had not lost any lions, not they! My mental pictures of the
+  snarling, magnificent king of beasts surrounded by an equally
+  snarling, magnificent pack vanished into thin air.</P>
+
+  <P>Our system was to cover as much likely country as we could,
+  and to let the dogs have a good time. As I have before indicated,
+  they were thoroughly doggy dogs, and interested in
+  everything&mdash;except able-bodied lions. None of the
+  stick-at-your-heels in their composition. They ranged far and
+  wide through all sorts of cover, seeking what they could find in
+  the way of porcupines, mongoose, hares, birds, cats, and whatever
+  else should interest any healthy-minded dog. If there happened to
+  be any lions in the path of these rangings, the dogs retired
+  rapidly, discreetly, and with every symptom of horrified disgust.
+  If a dog came sailing out of a thicket, ki-yi-ing agitatedly, and
+  took up his position, tail between his legs, behind his master,
+  we knew there was probably a lion about. Thus we hunted lions
+  with dogs.</P>
+
+  <P>But in order to be fair to these most excellent canines, it
+  should be recorded that they recovered a certain proportion of
+  their nerve after a rifle had been fired. They then returned
+  warily to the&mdash;not attack&mdash;reconnaissance. This trait
+  showed touching faith, and was a real compliment to the
+  marksmanship of their masters. Some day it will be misplaced. A
+  little cautious scouting on their part located the wounded beast;
+  whereupon, at a respectful distance, they lifted their voices. As
+  a large element of danger in case of a wounded lion is the
+  uncertainty as to his whereabouts, it will be seen that the dogs
+  were very valuable indeed. They seemed to know exactly how badly
+  hit any animal might happen to be, and to gauge their distance
+  accordingly, until at last, when the quarry was hammered to
+  harmlessness, they closed in and began to worry the nearly
+  lifeless carcass. By this policy the dogs had a lot of fun
+  hunting on their own hook, preserved their lives from otherwise
+  inevitable extinction, and were of great assistance in saving
+  their masters' skins.</P>
+
+  <P>One member of the pack, perhaps two, were, however, rather
+  pathetic figures. I refer to the setters, Wayward and Girlie.
+  Ranger, Ruby, Ben, and Nero scampered merrily over the landscape
+  after anything that stirred, from field mice to serval cats. All
+  was game to their catholic tastes; and you may be sure, in a
+  country like Africa, they had few dull moments. But Wayward and
+  Girlie had been brought up in a more exclusive manner. Their
+  early instincts had been supplemented by a rigorous early
+  training. Game to them meant birds, and birds only. Furthermore,
+  they had been solemnly assured by human persons in whom they had
+  the utmost confidence, that but one sequence of events was
+  permissible or even thinkable in the presence of game. The Dog at
+  first intimation by scent must convey the fact to the Man, must
+  proceed cautiously to locate exactly, must then stiffen to a
+  point which he must hold staunchly, no matter how distracting
+  events might turn out, or how long an interval might elapse. The
+  Man must next walk up the birds; shoot at them, perhaps kill one,
+  then command the Dog to retrieve. The Dog must on no account move
+  from his tracks until such command is given. All the affair is
+  perfectly simple; but quite inflexible. Any variation in this
+  procedure fills the honest bird dog's mind with the same horror
+  and dismay experienced by a well-brought-up young man who
+  discovers that he has on shoes of the wrong colour. It isn't
+  done, you know.</P>
+
+  <P>Consider, then, Wayward and Girlie in a country full of game
+  birds. They quarter wide to right, then cross to left, their
+  heads high, their feather tails waving in the most approved good
+  form. When they find birds they draw to their points in the best
+  possible style; stiffen out&mdash;and wait. It is now, according
+  to all good ethics, up to the Man. And the Man and his companions
+  go right on by, paying absolutely no attention either to the
+  situation or one's own magnificent piece of work! What is one to
+  conclude? That our early training is all wrong? that we are at
+  one experience to turn apostate to the settled and only correct
+  order of things? Or that our masters are no gentlemen? That is a
+  pretty difficult thing, an impossible thing, to conclude of one's
+  own master. But it leaves one in a fearful state mentally; and
+  one has no idea of what to do!</P>
+
+  <P>Wayward was a perfect gentleman, and he played the game
+  according to the very best traditions. He conscientiously pointed
+  every bird he could get his nose on. Furthermore he was
+  absolutely staunch, and held his point even when the four
+  non-bird dogs rushed in ahead of him. The expression of
+  puzzlement, grief, shock, and sadness in his eyes deepened as
+  bird after bird soared away without a shot. Girlie was more
+  liberal-minded. She pointed her birds, and backed Wayward at
+  need, but when the other dogs rushed her point, she rushed too.
+  And when we swept on by her, leaving her on point, instead of
+  holding it quixotically, as did Wayward, until the bird sneaked
+  away, she merely waited until we were out of sight, and then
+  tried to catch it. Finally Captain D. remarked that, lions or no
+  lions, he was not going to stand it any longer. He got out a
+  shotgun, and all one afternoon killed grouse over Wayward, to the
+  latter's intense relief. His ideals had been rehabilitated.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XX' id="XX"></A>
+
+  <H2>XX.</H2>
+
+  <P>BONDONI.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>We followed many depressions, in which might be lions, until
+  about three o'clock in the afternoon. Then we climbed the
+  gently-rising long slope that culminated, far above the plains,
+  in the peak of a hill called Bondoni. From a distance it was
+  steep and well defined; but, like most of these larger kopjes,
+  its actual ascent, up to the last few hundred feet, was so
+  gradual that we hardly knew we were climbing. At the summit we
+  found our men and the bullock cart. There also stood an oblong
+  blockhouse of stone, the walls two feet thick and ten feet high.
+  It was entered only by a blind angle passage, and was strong
+  enough, apparently, to resist small artillery. This structure was
+  simply an ostrich corral, and bitter experience had shown the
+  massive construction absolutely necessary as adequate protection,
+  in this exposed and solitary spot, against the lions.</P>
+
+  <P>We had some tea and bread and butter, and then Clifford Hill
+  and I set out afoot after meat. Only occasionally do these
+  hard-working settlers get a chance for hunting on the plains so
+  near them; and now they had promised their native retainers that
+  they would send back a treat of game. To carry this promised
+  luxury, a number of the villagers had accompanied the bullock
+  wagon. As we were to move on next day, it became very desirable
+  to get the meat promptly while still near home.</P>
+
+  <P>We slipped over to the other side, and by good fortune caught
+  sight of a dozen zebras feeding in scrub half-way down the hill.
+  They were out of their proper environment up there, but we were
+  glad of it. Down on our tummies, then, we dropped, and crawled
+  slowly forward through the high, sweet grasses. We were in the
+  late afternoon shadow of the hill, and we enjoyed the mild skill
+  of the stalk. Taking advantage of every cover, slipping over into
+  little ravines, lying very flat when one of the beasts raised his
+  head, we edged nearer and nearer. We were already well within
+  range, but it amused us to play the game. Finally, at one hundred
+  yards, we came to a halt. The zebra showed very handsome at that
+  range, for even their smaller leg stripes were all plainly
+  visible. Of course at that distance there could be small chance
+  of missing, and we owned one each. The Wakamba, who had been
+  watching eagerly, swarmed down, shouting.</P>
+
+  <P>We dined just at sunset under a small tree at the very top of
+  the peak. Long bars of light shot through the western clouds; the
+  plain turned from solid earth to a mysterious sea of shifting
+  twilights; the buttes stood up, wrapped in veils of soft desert
+  colours; Kilimanjaro hung suspended like a rose-coloured bubble
+  above the abyss beyond the world.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XXI' id="XXI"></A>
+
+  <H2>XXI.</H2>
+
+  <P>RIDING THE PLAINS.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>From the mere point of view of lions, lion A hunting was very
+  slow work indeed. It meant riding the whole of long days, from
+  dawn until dark, investigating miles of country that looked all
+  alike and in which we seemed to get nowhere. One by one the long
+  billows of plain fell behind, until our camp hill had turned blue
+  behind us, and we seemed to be out in illimitable space, with no
+  possibility, in an ordinary lifetime, of ever getting in touch
+  with anything again. What from above had looked as level as a
+  floor now turned into a tremendously wide and placid ground
+  swell. As a consequence we were always going imperceptibly up and
+  up and up to a long-delayed sky-line, or tipping as gently down
+  the other side of the wave. From crest to crest of these long
+  billows measured two or three miles. The vertical distance in
+  elevation from trough to top was perhaps not over fifty to one
+  hundred feet.</P>
+
+  <P>Slowly we rode along the shallow grass and brush ravines in
+  the troughs of the low billows, while the dogs worked eagerly in
+  and out of cover, and our handful of savages cast stones and
+  shouted. Occasionally we divided forces, and beat the length of a
+  hill, two of us lying in wait at one end for the possible lion,
+  the rest sweeping the sides and summits. Many animals came
+  bounding along, but no lions. Then Harold Hill, unlimbering a
+  huge, many-jointed telescope, would lie flat on his back, and
+  sight the fearsome instrument over his crossed feet, in a general
+  bird's-eye view of the plains for miles around. While he was at
+  it we were privileged to look about us, less under the burden of
+  responsibility. We could make out the game as little,
+  light-coloured dots and speckles, thousands upon thousands of
+  them, thicker than cattle ever grazed on the open range, and as
+  far as the eye could make them out, and then a glance through our
+  glasses picked them up again for mile after mile. Even the
+  six-power could go no farther. The imagination was left the
+  vision of more leagues of wild animals even to the half-guessed
+  azure mountains&mdash;and beyond. I had seen abundant game
+  elsewhere in Africa, but nothing like the multitudes inhabiting
+  the Kapiti Plains at that time of year. In other seasons this
+  locality is comparatively deserted.</P>
+
+  <P>The glass revealing nothing in our line, we rode again to the
+  lower levels, and again took up our slow, painstaking search.</P>
+
+  <P>But although three days went by in this manner without our
+  getting a glimpse of lions, they were far from being days lost.
+  Minor adventure filled our hours. What elsewhere would be of
+  major interest and strange and interesting experience met us at
+  every turn. The game, while abundant, was very shy. This had
+  nothing to do with distrust of hunters, but merely with the fact
+  that it was the season of green grass. We liked to come upon
+  animals unexpectedly, to see them buck-jump and cavort.</P>
+
+  <P>Otherwise we rode in a moving space cleared of animals, the
+  beasts unobtrusively giving way before us, and as unobtrusively
+  closing in behind. The sun flashed on the spears of savages
+  travelling single file across the distance. Often we stopped
+  short to gaze upon a wild and tumbled horizon of storm that
+  Gustave Dor&eacute; might have drawn.</P>
+
+  <P>The dogs were always joyously routing out some beast,
+  desirable from their point of view, and chasing it hopelessly
+  about, to our great amusement. Once they ran into a giant
+  porcupine-about the size a setter would be, with shorter
+  legs-which did not understand running away. They came upon it in
+  a dense thicket, and the ensuing row was unholy. They managed to
+  kill the porcupine among them, after which we plucked barbed
+  quills from some very grieved dogs. The quills were large enough
+  to make excellent penholders. The dogs also swore by all canine
+  gods that they wouldn't do a thing to a hyena, if only they could
+  get hold of one. They never got hold of one, for the hyena is a
+  coward. His skull and teeth, however, are as big and powerful as
+  those of a lioness; so I do not know which was luckier in his
+  avoidance of trouble&mdash;he or the dogs.</P>
+
+  <P>Nor from the shooting standpoint did we lack for sport. We had
+  to shoot for our men, and we occasionally needed meat ourselves.
+  It was always interesting, when such necessities arose, to stalk
+  the shy buck and do long-range rifle practice. This shooting,
+  however, was done only after the day's hunt was over. We had no
+  desire to spoil our lion chances.</P>
+
+  <P>The long circle towards our evening camp always proved very
+  long indeed. We arrived at dusk to find supper ready for us. As
+  we were old campaigners we ate this off chop boxes as tables, and
+  sat on the ground. It was served by a Wakamba youth we had
+  nicknamed Herbert Spencer, on account of his gigantic intellect.
+  Herbert meant well, but about all he succeeded in accomplishing
+  was a pathetically wrinkled brow of care and scared eyes. He had
+  never been harshly treated by any of us, but he acted as though
+  always ready to bolt. If there were twenty easy right methods of
+  doing a thing and one difficult wrong method, Herbert would get
+  the latter every time. No amount of experience could teach him
+  the logic of our simplest ways. One evening he brought a tumbler
+  of mixed water and condensed milk. Harold Hill glanced into the
+  receptacle.</P>
+
+  <P>"Stir it," he commanded briefly.</P>
+
+  <P>Herbert Spencer obeyed. We talked about something else. Some
+  five or ten minutes later one of us noticed that Herbert was
+  still stirring, and called attention to the fact. When the latter
+  saw our eyes were on him he speeded up until the spoon fairly
+  rattled in the tumbler. Then, when he thought our attention had
+  relaxed again, he relaxed also his efforts&mdash;the spoon
+  travelled slower and slower in its dreamy circle. We amused
+  ourselves for some time thus. Then we became so weak from
+  laughter that we fell backward off our seats, and some one gasped
+  a command that Herbert cease.</P>
+
+  <P>I am afraid, after a little, that we rather enjoyed mildly
+  tormenting poor Herbert Spencer. He tried so hard, and looked so
+  scared, and was so unbelievably stupid! Almost always he had to
+  pick his orders word by word from a vast amount of high-flown,
+  unnecessary English.</P>
+
+  <P>"O Herbert Spencer," the command would run, "if you would
+  condescend to bend your mighty intellect to the lowly subject of
+  maji, and will snatch time from your profound cerebrations to
+  assure its being moto sans, I would esteem it infinite
+  condescension on your part to let pesi pesi."</P>
+
+  <P>And Herbert, listening to all this with a painful, strained
+  intensity, would catch the six-key words, and would falter forth
+  a trembling "N'dio bwana."</P>
+
+  <P>Somewhere down deep within Herbert Spencer's make up, however,
+  was a sense of moral duty. When we finally broke camp for good,
+  on the great hill of Lucania, Herbert Spencer, relieved from his
+  job, bolted like a shot. As far as we could see him he was
+  running at top speed. If he had not possessed a sense of duty, he
+  would have done this long ago.</P>
+
+  <P>We camped always well up on some of the numerous hills; for,
+  although anxious enough to find lions in the daytime, we had no
+  use for them at all by night. This usually meant that the boys
+  had to carry water some distance. We kept a canvas bath-tub full
+  for the benefit of the dogs, from which they could drink at any
+  time. This necessary privilege after a hard day nearly drove
+  Captain D. crazy. It happened like this:</P>
+
+  <P>We were riding along the slope of a hillside, when in the
+  ravine, a half mile away and below us, we saw something dark pop
+  up in sight and then down again. We shouted to some of the savage
+  Wakamba to go and investigate. They closed in from all sides,
+  their long spears poised to strike. At the last moment out
+  darted, not an animal, but a badly frightened old man armed with
+  bow and arrow. He dashed out under the upraised spears, clasped
+  one of the men around the knees, and implored protection. Our
+  savages, their spears ready, glanced over their shoulders for
+  instruction. They would have liked nothing better than to have
+  spitted the poor old fellow.</P>
+
+  <P>We galloped down as fast as possible to the rescue. With
+  reluctance our spearmen drew back, releasing their prize. We
+  picked up his scattered bows and arrows, restored them to him,
+  and uttered many reassurances. He was so badly frightened that he
+  could not stand for the trembling of his knees. Undoubtedly he
+  thought that war had broken out, and that he was the first of its
+  unconscious victims. After calming him down, we told him what we
+  were doing, and offered to shoot him meat if he cared to
+  accompany us. He accepted the offer with joy. So pleased and
+  relieved was he, that he skipped about like a young and nimble
+  goat. His hunting companion, who all this time had stood atop of
+  a hill at a safe distance, viewed these performances with
+  concern. Our captive shouted loudly for him to come join us and
+  share in the good fortune. Not he! He knew a trap when he saw
+  one! Not a bit disturbed by the tales this man would probably
+  carry back home, our old fellow attached himself to us for three
+  days!</P>
+
+  <P>Near sundown, to make our promise good, and also to give our
+  own men a feast, I shot two hartebeeste near camp.</P>
+
+  <P>The evening was beautiful. The Machakos Range, miles distant
+  across the valley, was mantled with thick, soft clouds. From our
+  elevation we could see over them, and catch the glow of moonlight
+  on their upper surfaces. We were very tired, so we turned in
+  early and settled ourselves for a good rest.</P>
+
+  <P>Outside our tent the little "Injun fire" we had built for our
+  own comfort died down to coals. A short distance away, however,
+  was a huge bonfire around which all the savages were gathered.
+  They squatted comfortably on their heels, roasting meat. Behind
+  each man was planted his glittering long-bladed spear. The old
+  man held the place of honour, as befitted his flirtation with
+  death that morning. Everybody was absolutely happy&mdash;a good
+  fire, plenty of meat, and strangers with whom to have a grand
+  "shauri." The clatter of tongues was a babel, for almost every
+  one talked at once and excitedly. Those who did not talk crooned
+  weird, improvised chants, in which they detailed the doings of
+  the camp.</P>
+
+  <P>We fell very quickly into the half doze of too great
+  exhaustion. It never became more than a half doze. I suppose
+  every one who reads this has had at some time the experience of
+  dropping asleep to the accompaniment of some noise that ought
+  soon to cease&mdash;a conversation in the next room, singing, the
+  barking of a dog, the playing of music, or the like. The fact
+  that it ought soon to cease, permits the falling asleep. When,
+  after an interval, the subconsciousness finds the row still going
+  on, inexcusable and unabated, it arouses the victim to staring
+  exasperation. That was our case here. Those natives should have
+  turned in for sleep after a reasonable amount of pow-wow. They
+  did nothing of the kind. On the contrary, I dragged reluctantly
+  back to consciousness and the realization that they had quite
+  happily settled down to make a night of it. I glanced across the
+  little tent to where Captain D. lay on his cot. He was staring
+  straight upward, his eyes wide open.</P>
+
+  <P>After a few seconds he slipped out softly and silently. Our
+  little fire had sunk to embers. A dozen sticks radiated from the
+  centre of coals. Each made a firebrand with one end cool to the
+  grasp. Captain D. hurled one of these at the devoted and
+  unconscious group.</P>
+
+  <P>It whirled through the air and fell plunk in the other fire,
+  scattering sparks and coals in all directions. The second was
+  under way before the first had landed. It hit a native with
+  similar results, plus astonished and grieved language. The rest
+  followed in rapid-magazine-fire. Every one hit its mark fair and
+  square. The air was full of sparks exploding in all directions.
+  The brush was full of Wakamba, their blankets flapping in the
+  breeze of their going. The convention was adjourned. There fell
+  the sucking vacuum of a great silence. Captain D., breathing
+  righteous wrath, flopped heavily and determinedly down on his
+  cot. I caught a faint snicker from the tent next door.</P>
+
+  <P>Captain D. sighed deeply, turned over, and prepared to sleep.
+  Then one of the dogs uprose&mdash;I think it was
+  Ben&mdash;stretched himself, yawned, approached deliberately, and
+  began to drink from the canvas bath-tub just outside. He
+  drank&mdash;lap, lap, lap, lap&mdash;for a very long time. It
+  seemed incredible that any mere dog&mdash;or canvas
+  bath-tub&mdash;could hold so much water. The steady repetition of
+  this sound long after it should logically have ceased was worse
+  than the shenzi gathering around the fire. Each lap should have
+  been the last, but it was not. The shenzi convention had been
+  abated with firebrands, but the dog was strictly within his
+  rights. The poor pups had had a long day with little water, and
+  they could hardly be blamed for feeling a bit feverish now. At
+  last Ben ceased. Next morning Captain D. claimed vehemently that
+  he had drunk two hours forty-nine minutes and ten seconds. With a
+  contented sigh Ben lay down. Then Ruby got up, shook herself, and
+  yawned. A bright idea struck her. She too went over and had a
+  drink. After that I, personally, went to sleep. But in the
+  morning I found Captain D. staring-eyed and strung nearly to
+  madness, trying feverishly to calculate how seven dogs drinking
+  on an average of three hours apiece could have finished by
+  morning. When Harold Hill innocently asked if he had slept well,
+  the captain threw the remaining but now extinct firebrand at
+  him.</P>
+
+  <P>One of the safari boys, a big Baganda, had twisted his foot a
+  little, and it had swelled up considerably. In the morning he
+  came to have it attended to. The obvious treatment was very hot
+  water and rest; but it would never do to tell him so. The
+  recommendation of so simple a remedy would lose me his faith. So
+  I gave him a little dab of tick ointment wrapped in a leaf.</P>
+
+  <P>"This," said I, "is most wonderful medicine; but it is also
+  most dangerous. If you were to rub it on your foot or your hand
+  or any part of you, that part would drop off. But if you wash the
+  part in very hot water continuously for a half hour, and then put
+  on the medicine, it is good, and will cure you very soon." I am
+  sure I do not know what they put in tick ointment; nor, for the
+  purpose, did it greatly matter. That night, also, Herbert Spencer
+  reached the climax of his absurdities. The chops he had cooked
+  did not quite suffice for our hunger, so we instructed him to
+  give us some of the leg. By this we meant steak, of course.
+  Herbert Spencer was gone so long a time that finally we went to
+  see what possibly could be the matter. We found him trying
+  desperately to cook the whole leg in a frying-pan!</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XXII' id="XXII"></A>
+
+  <H2>XXII.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE SECOND LIONESS.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>Now our luck changed most abruptly. We had been riding since
+  early morning over the wide plains. By and by we came to a wide,
+  shallow, flood-water course carpeted with lava boulders and
+  scant, scattered brush. Two of us took one side of it, and two
+  the other. At this we were just within hailing distance. The boys
+  wandered down the middle.</P>
+
+  <P>Game was here very abundant, and in this broken country proved
+  quite approachable. I saw one Grant's gazelle head, in especial,
+  that greatly tempted me; but we were hunting lions, and other
+  shooting was out of place. Also the prospects for lions had
+  brightened, for we were continually seeing hyenas in packs of
+  from three to six. They lay among the stones, but galloped away
+  at our approach. The game paid not the slightest attention to
+  these huge, skulking brutes. One passed within twenty feet of a
+  hartebeeste; the latter hardly glanced at him. As the hyena is
+  lazy as well as cowardly, and almost never does his killing, we
+  inferred a good meat supply to gather so many of them in one
+  place. From a tributary ravine we flushed nineteen!</P>
+
+  <P>Harold Hill was riding with me on the right bank. His quick
+  eye caught a glimpse of something beyond our companions on the
+  left side. A glance through the glasses showed me that it was a
+  lion, just disappearing over the hill. At once we turned our
+  horses to cross. It was a heavy job. We were naturally in a
+  tremendous hurry; and the footing among those boulders and
+  rounded rocks was so vile that a very slow trot was the best we
+  could accomplish. And that was only by standing in our stirrups,
+  and holding up our horses' heads by main strength. We reached the
+  sky-line in time to see a herd of game stampeding away from a
+  depression a half-mile away. We fixed our eyes on that point, and
+  a moment later saw the lion or lioness, as it turned out, leap a
+  gully and come out the other side.</P>
+
+  <P>The footing down this slope, too, was appalling, consisting
+  mainly of chunks of lava interspersed with smooth, rounded stones
+  and sparse tufts of grass. In spite of the stones we managed a
+  sort of stumbling gallop. Why we did not all go down in a heap I
+  do not know. At any rate we had no chance to watch our quarry,
+  for we were forced to keep our eyes strictly to our way. When
+  finally we emerged from that tumble of rocks, she had
+  disappeared.</P>
+
+  <P>Either she had galloped out over the plains, or she had
+  doubled back to take cover in the ravine. In the latter case she
+  would stand. Our first job, therefore, was to determine whether
+  she had escaped over the open country. To this end we galloped
+  our horses madly in four different directions, pushing them to
+  the utmost, swooping here and there in wide circles. That was an
+  exhilarating ten minutes until we had surmounted every billow of
+  the plain, spied in all directions, and assured ourselves beyond
+  doubt that she had not run off. The horses fairly flew, spurning
+  the hard sod, leaping the rock dikes, skipping nimbly around the
+  pig holes, turning like cow-ponies under pressure of knee and
+  rein. Finally we drew up, converged, and together jogged our
+  sweating horses back to the ravine. There we learned from the
+  boys that nothing more had been seen of our quarry.</P>
+
+  <P>We dismounted, handed our mounts to their syces, and prepared
+  to make afoot a clean sweep of the wide, shallow ravine. Here was
+  where the dogs came in handy. We left a rearguard of two men, and
+  slowly began our beat.</P>
+
+  <P>The ravine could hardly be called a ravine; rather a shallow
+  depression with banks not over a foot high, and with a varying
+  width of from two to two hundred feet. The grass grew very
+  patchy, and not very high; in fact, it seemed hardly tall enough
+  to conceal anything as large as a lioness. We men walked along
+  the edge of this depression, while the dogs ranged back and forth
+  in its bottom.</P>
+
+  <P>We had gone thus a quarter-mile when one of the rearguard came
+  running up.</P>
+
+  <P>"Bwana," said he, "we have seen the lioness. She is lying in a
+  patch of grass. After you had passed, we saw her raise her
+  head."</P>
+
+  <P>It seemed impossible that she should have escaped both our
+  eyes and the dogs' noses, but we returned. The man pointed out a
+  thin growth of dried, yellow grass ten feet in diameter. Then it
+  seemed even more incredible. Apparently we could look right
+  through every foot of it. The man persisted, so we advanced in
+  battle array. At thirty yards Captain D. saw the black tips of
+  her ears. We all looked hard, and at last made her out, lying
+  very flat, her head between her paws. Even then she was shadowy
+  and unreal, and, as I have said, the cover did not look thick
+  enough to conceal a good-sized dog.</P>
+
+  <P>As though she realized she had been sighted, she at this
+  moment leapt to her feet. Instantly I put a.405 bullet into her
+  shoulder. Any other lion I ever saw or heard of would in such
+  circumstances and at such a distance immediately have charged
+  home. She turned tail and ran away. I missed her as she ran, then
+  knocked her down with a third shot. She got up again, but was
+  immediately hit by Captain D.'s.350 Magnum and brought to a halt.
+  The dogs, seeing her turn tail and hearing our shots, had
+  scrambled madly after her. We dared not shoot again for fear of
+  hitting one of them, so we dashed rapidly into the grass and out
+  the other side. Before we could get to her, she had sent Ruby
+  flying through the air, and had then fallen over dead. Ruby got
+  off lucky with only a deep gash the length of her leg.</P>
+
+  <P>This was the only instance I experienced of a wounded lion
+  showing the white feather. She was, however, only about
+  three-quarters grown, and was suffering from diarrhoea.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XXIII' id="XXIII"></A>
+
+  <H2>XXIII.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE BIG LION.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>The boys skinned her while we ate lunch. Then we started
+  several of them back towards camp with the trophy, and ourselves
+  cut across country to a small river known as the Stony Athi.
+  There we dismounted from our horses, and sent them and the boys
+  atop the ridge above the stream, while we ourselves explored
+  afoot the hillside along the river.</P>
+
+  <P>This was a totally different sort of country from that to
+  which we had been accustomed. Imagine a very bouldery hillside
+  planted thickly with knee-high brambles and more sparsely with
+  higher bushes. They were not really brambles, of course, but
+  their tripping, tangling, spiky qualities were the same. We had
+  to force our way through these, or step from boulder to boulder.
+  Only very rarely did we get a little rubbly clear space to walk
+  in, and then for only ten or twenty feet. We tried in spaced
+  intervals to cover the whole hillside. It was very hard work. The
+  boys, with the horses, kept pace with us on the sky-line atop,
+  and two or three hundred yards away.</P>
+
+  <P>We had proceeded in this fashion for about a mile, when
+  suddenly, and most unexpectedly, the biggest lion I ever saw
+  leapt straight up from a bush twenty-five yards in front of me,
+  and with a tremendous roar vanished behind another bush. I had
+  just time to throw up the.405 shotgun-fashion and let drive a
+  snapshot. Clifford Hill, who was ten yards to my right, saw the
+  fur fly, and we all heard the snarl as the bullet hit. Naturally
+  we expected an instant charge, but, as things turned out, it was
+  evident the lion had not seen us at all. He had leapt at the
+  sight of our men and horses on the sky-line, and when the bullet
+  hit he must have ascribed it to them. At any rate, he began to
+  circle through the tangled vines in their direction.</P>
+
+  <P>From their elevation they could follow his movements. At once
+  they set up howls of terror and appeals for help. Some began
+  frantically to run back and forth. None of them tried to run
+  away; there was nowhere to go! The only thing that saved them was
+  the thick and spiky character of the cover. The lion, instead of
+  charging straight and fast, was picking an easy way.</P>
+
+  <P>We tore directly up hill as fast as we were able, leaping from
+  rock to rock, and thrusting recklessly through the tangle. About
+  half-way up I jumped to the top of a high, conical rock, and
+  thence by good luck caught sight of the lion's great yellow head
+  advancing steadily about eighty yards away. I took as good a
+  sight as I could and pulled trigger. The recoil knocked me clear
+  off the boulder, but as I fell I saw his tail go up and knew that
+  I had hit. At once Clifford Hill and I jumped up on the rock
+  again, but the lion had moved out of sight. By this time,
+  however, the sound of the shots and the smell of blood had caused
+  the dogs to close in. They did not, of course, attempt to attack
+  the lion, nor even to get very near him, but their snarling and
+  barking showed us the beast's whereabouts. Even this much is bad
+  judgment on their part, as a number of them have been killed at
+  it. The thicket burst into an unholy row.</P>
+
+  <P>We all manoeuvred rapidly for position. Again luck was with
+  me, for again I saw his great head, the mane standing out all
+  around it; and for the second time I planted a heavy bullet
+  square in his chest. This stopped his advance; he lay down. His
+  head was up and his eyes glared, as he uttered the most
+  reverberating and magnificent roars and growls. The dogs leapt
+  and barked around him. We came quite close, and I planted my
+  fourth bullet in his shoulder. Even this was not enough. It took
+  a fifth in the same place to finish him, and he died at last
+  biting great chunks of earth.</P>
+
+  <P>The howls from the hill top ceased. All gathered to marvel at
+  the lion's immense size. He measured three feet nine inches at
+  the shoulder, and nine feet eleven inches between stakes, or ten
+  feet eleven inches along contour. This is only five inches under
+  record. We weighed him piecemeal, after a fashion, and put him
+  between 550 and 600 pounds.</P>
+
+  <P>But these are only statistics, and mean little unless a real
+  attempt is made to visualize them. As a matter of fact, his mere
+  height&mdash;that of a medium-size zebra-was little unless
+  accented by the impression of his tremendous power and
+  quickness.</P>
+
+  <P>We skinned him, and then rode four long hours to camp. We
+  arrived at dark, and at once set to work preparing the trophy. A
+  dozen of us squatted around the skin, working by lantern light.
+  Memba Sasa had had nothing to eat since before dawn, but in his
+  pride and delight he refused to touch a mouthful until the job
+  was finished. Several times we urged him to stop long enough for
+  even a bite. He steadily declined, and whetted his knife, his
+  eyes gleaming with delight, his lips crooning one of his weird
+  Monumwezi songs. At eleven o'clock the task was done. Then I
+  presented Memba Sasa with a tall mug of coffee and lots of sugar.
+  He considered this a great honour.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XXIV' id="XXIV"></A>
+
+  <H2>XXIV.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE FIFTEEN LIONS.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>Two days before Captain D. and I were to return to Juja we
+  approached, about eleven o'clock in the morning, a long, low,
+  rugged range of hills called Lucania. They were not very high,
+  but bold with cliffs, buttes, and broken rocky stretches. Here we
+  were to make our final hunt.</P>
+
+  <P>We led our safari up to the level of a boulder flat between
+  two deep ca&ntilde;ons that ran down from the hills. Here should
+  be water, so we gathered under a lone little tree, and set about
+  directing the simple disposition of our camp. Herbert Spencer
+  brought us a cold lunch, and we sat down to rest and refreshment
+  before tackling the range.</P>
+
+  <P>Hardly had we taken the first mouthfuls, however, when Memba
+  Sasa, gasping for breath, came tearing up the slope from the
+  ca&ntilde;on where he had descended for a drink. "Lions!" he
+  cried, guardedly. "I went to drink, and I saw four lions. Two
+  were lying under the shade, but two others were playing like
+  puppies, one on its back."</P>
+
+  <P>While he was speaking a lioness wandered out from the
+  ca&ntilde;on and up the opposite slope. She was somewhere between
+  six and nine hundred yards away, and looked very tiny; but the
+  binoculars brought us up to her with a jump. Through them she
+  proved to be a good one. She was not at all hurried, but paused
+  from time to time to yawn and look about her. After a short
+  interval, another, also a lioness, followed in her footsteps. She
+  too had climbed clear when a third, probably a full-grown but
+  still immature lion, came out, and after him the fourth.</P>
+
+  <P>"You were right," we told Memba Sasa, "there are your
+  four."</P>
+
+  <P>But while we watched, a fifth, again at the spaced interval,
+  this time a maned lion, clambered leisurely up in the wake of his
+  family; and after him another, and another, and yet another! We
+  gasped, and sat down, the better to steady our glasses with our
+  knees. There seemed no end to lions. They came out of that
+  apparently inexhaustible ca&ntilde;on bed one at a time and at
+  the same regular intervals; perhaps twenty yards or so apart. It
+  was almost as though they were being released singly. Finally we
+  had <I>fifteen</I> in sight.</P>
+
+  <P>It was a most magnificent spectacle, and we could enjoy it
+  unhurried by the feeling that we were losing opportunities. At
+  that range it would be silly to open fire. If we had descended to
+  the ca&ntilde;on in order to follow them out the other side, they
+  would merely have trotted away. Our only chance was to wait until
+  they had disappeared from sight, and then to attempt a wide
+  circle in order to catch them from the flank. In the meantime we
+  had merely to sit still.</P>
+
+  <P>Therefore we stared through our glasses, and enjoyed to the
+  full this most unusual sight. There were four cubs about as big
+  as setter dogs, four full-grown but immature youngsters, four
+  lionesses, and three male lions. They kept their spaced, single
+  file formation for two-thirds the ascent of the
+  hill&mdash;probably the nature of the ground forced them to
+  it&mdash;and then gradually drew together. Near the top, but
+  still below the summit, they entered a jumble of boulders and
+  stopped. We could make out several of them lying down. One fine
+  old yellow fellow stretched himself comfortably atop a flat rock,
+  in the position of a bronze lion on a pedestal. We waited twenty
+  minutes to make sure they were not going to move. Then, leaving
+  all our men except the gunbearers under the tree, we slipped back
+  until out of sight, and began to execute our flank movement. The
+  chances seemed good. The jumble of boulders was surrounded by
+  open country, and it was improbable the lions could leave it
+  without being seen. We had arranged with our men a system of
+  signals.</P>
+
+  <P>For two hours we walked very hard in order to circle out of
+  sight, down wind, and to gain the other side of the ridge back of
+  the lions. We purposed slipping over the ridge and attacking from
+  above. Even this was but a slight advantage. The job was a stiff
+  one, for we might expect certainly the majority to charge.</P>
+
+  <P>Therefore, when we finally deployed in skirmish order and bore
+  down on that patch of brush and boulders, we were braced for the
+  shock of battle. We found nothing. Our men, however, signalled
+  that the lions had not left cover. After a little search,
+  however, we discovered a very shallow depression running
+  slantwise up the hill and back of the cover. So slight it was
+  that even the glasses had failed to show it from below. The lions
+  had in all probability known about us from the start, and were
+  all the time engaged in withdrawing after their leisurely
+  fashion.</P>
+
+  <P>Of course we hunted for them; in fact, we spent two days at
+  it; but we never found trace of them again. The country was too
+  hard for tracking. They had left Lucania. Probably by the time we
+  had completed our two hours of flanking movement they were five
+  miles away. The presence of cubs would account for this. In
+  ordinary circumstances we should have had a wonderful and
+  exciting fight. But the sight of those fifteen great beasts was
+  one I shall never forget.</P>
+
+  <P>After we had hunted Lucania thoroughly we parted company with
+  the Hills, and returned to Juja Farm.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='PART_V' id="PART_V"></A>
+
+  <H2>PART V.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE TSAVO RIVER.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XXV' id="XXV"></A>
+
+  <H2>XXV.</H2>
+
+  <P>VOI.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>Part way up the narrow-gauge railroad from the coast is a
+  station called Voi. On his way to the interior the traveller
+  stops there for an evening meal. It is served in a high, wide
+  stone room by white-robed Swahilis under command of a very
+  efficient and quiet East Indian. The voyager steps out into the
+  darkness to look across the way upon the outlines of two great
+  rounded hills against an amethyst sky. That is all he ever sees
+  of Voi, for on the down trip he passes through it about two
+  o'clock in the morning.</P>
+
+  <P>At that particularly trying hour F. and I descended, and
+  attempted, by the light of lanterns, to sort out twenty safari
+  boys strange to us, and miscellaneous camp stores. We did not
+  entirely succeed. Three men were carried on down the line, and
+  the fly to our tent was never seen again.</P>
+
+  <P>The train disappeared. Our boys, shivering, crept into
+  corners. We took possession of the dak-bungalow maintained by the
+  railroad for just such travellers as ourselves. It was simply a
+  high stone room, with three iron beds, and a corner so cemented
+  that one could pour pails of water over one's self without
+  wetting the whole place. The beds were supplied with mosquito
+  canopies and strong wire springs. Over these we spread our own
+  bedding, and thankfully resumed our slumbers.</P>
+
+  <P>The morning discovered to us Voi as the station, the district
+  commissioner's house on a distant side hill, and a fairly
+  extensive East Indian bazaar. The keepers of the latter traded
+  with the natives. Immediately about the station grew some flat
+  shady trees. All else was dense thorn scrub pressing close about
+  the town. Opposite were the tall, rounded mountains.</P>
+
+  <P>Nevertheless, in spite of its appearance, Voi has its
+  importance in the scheme of things. From it, crossing the great
+  Serengetti desert, runs the track to Kilimanjaro and that part of
+  German East Africa. The Germans have as yet no railroad; so they
+  must perforce patronize the British line thus far, and then trek
+  across. As the Kilimanjaro district is one rich in natives and
+  trade, the track is well used. Most of the transport is done by
+  donkeys&mdash;either in carts or under the pack saddle. As the
+  distance from water to water is very great, the journey is a hard
+  one. This fact, and the incidental consideration that from fly
+  and hardship the mortality in donkeys is very heavy, pushes the
+  freight rates high. And that fact accounts for the motor car,
+  which has been my point of aim from the beginning of this
+  paragraph.</P>
+
+  <P>The motor car plies between Voi and the German line at
+  exorbitant rates. Our plan was to have it take us and some
+  galvanized water tanks out into the middle of the desert and dump
+  us down there. So after breakfast we hunted up the owner.</P>
+
+  <P>He proved to be a very short, thick-set, blond German youth
+  who justified Weber and Fields. In fact, he talked so exactly
+  like those comedians that my task in visualizing him to you is
+  somewhat lightened. If all, instead of merely a majority of my
+  readers, had seen Weber and Fields that task would vanish.</P>
+
+  <P>We explained our plan, and asked him his price.</P>
+
+  <P>"Sefen hundert and feefty rupees,"<A name='FNanchor_11_11' id=
+  "FNanchor_11_11"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_11_11'><SUP>[11]</SUP></A> said he
+  uncompromisingly.</P>
+
+  <P>He was abrupt, blunt, and insulting. As we wanted
+  transportation very much&mdash;though not seven hundred and fifty
+  rupees' worth&mdash;we persisted. He offered an imperturbable
+  take-it-or-leave-it stolidity. The motor truck stood near. I said
+  something technical about the engine; then something more. He
+  answered these remarks, though grudgingly. I suggested that it
+  took a mighty good driver to motor through this rough country. He
+  mentioned a particular hill. I proposed that we should try the
+  station restaurant for beer while he told me about it. He
+  grunted, but headed for the station.</P>
+
+  <P>For two hours we listened to the most blatant boasting. He was
+  a great driver; he had driven for M., the American millionaire;
+  for the Chinese Ambassador to France; for Grand-Duke Alexis; for
+  the Kaiser himself! We learned how he had been the trusted
+  familiar of these celebrities, how on various occasions&mdash;all
+  detailed at length&mdash;he had been treated by them as an equal;
+  and he told us sundry sly, slanderous, and disgusting anecdotes
+  of these worthies, his forefinger laid one side his nose. When we
+  finally got him worked up to the point of going to get some
+  excessively bad photographs, "I haf daken myself!" we began to
+  have hopes. So we tentatively approached once more the subject of
+  transportation.</P>
+
+  <P>Then the basis of the trouble came out. One Davis, M.P. from
+  England, had also dealt with our friend. Davis, as we
+  reconstructed him, was of the blunt type, with probably very
+  little feeling of democracy for those in subordinate positions,
+  and with, most certainly, a good deal of insular and racial
+  prejudice. Evidently a rather vague bargain had been struck, and
+  the motor had set forth. Then ensued financial wranglings and
+  disputes as to terms. It ended by useless hauteur on Davis's
+  part, and inexcusable but effective action by the German. For
+  Davis found himself dumped down on the Serengetti desert and left
+  there.</P>
+
+  <P>We heard all this in excruciatingly funny Weberandfieldese,
+  many times repeated. The German literally beat his breast and
+  cried aloud against Davis. We unblushingly sacrificed a probably
+  perfectly worthy Davis to present need, and cried out against him
+  too.</P>
+
+  <P>"Am I like one dog?" demanded the German fervently.</P>
+
+  <P>"Certainly not," we cried with equal fervour. We both like
+  dogs.</P>
+
+  <P>Then followed wearisomely reiterated assurances that we, at
+  least, knew how a gentleman should be treated, and more boasting
+  of proud connections in the past. But the end of it was a bargain
+  of reasonable dimensions for ourselves, our personal boys, and
+  our loads. Under plea of starting our safari boys off we left
+  him, and crept, with shattered nerves, around the corner of the
+  dak-bungalow. There we lurked, busy at pretended affairs, until
+  our friend swaggered away to the Hindu quarters, where, it seems,
+  he had his residence.</P>
+
+  <P>About ten o'clock a small safari marched in afoot. It had
+  travelled all of two nights across the Thirst, and was glad to
+  get there. The single white man in charge had been three years
+  alone among the natives near Kilimanjaro, and he was now out for
+  a six months' vacation at home. Two natives in the uniform of
+  Sudanese troops hovered near him very sorrowful. He splashed into
+  the water of the dak-bungalow, and then introduced himself. We
+  sat in teakwood easy-chairs and talked all day. He was a most
+  interesting, likeable, and cordial man, at any stage of the game.
+  The game, by means of French vermouth&mdash;of all
+  drinks!&mdash;progressed steadily. We could hardly blame him for
+  celebrating. By the afternoon he wanted to give things away. So
+  insistent was he that F. finally accepted an ebony walking-stick,
+  and I an ebony knife inset with ivory. If we had been the least
+  bit unscrupulous, I am afraid the relatives at home would have
+  missed their African souvenirs. He went out <I>vi&acirc;</I>
+  freight car, all by himself, seated regally in a steamer chair
+  between two wide-open side doors, one native squatted on either
+  side to see that he did not lurch out into the landscape.</P>
+
+  <P>FOOTNOTES:</P><A name='Footnote_11_11' id=
+  "Footnote_11_11"></A><A href='#FNanchor_11_11'>[11]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>Fifty pounds.</P>
+  </DIV>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XXVI' id="XXVI"></A>
+
+  <H2>XXVI.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE FRINGE-EARED ORYX.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>At ten o'clock the following morning we started. On the high
+  front seat, under an awning, sat the German, F., and I. The body
+  of the truck was filled with safari loads, Memba Sasa, Simba
+  Mohammed, and F.'s boy, whose name I have forgotten. The
+  arrangement on the front seat was due to a strike on the part of
+  F.</P>
+
+  <P>"Look here," said he to me, "you've got to sit next that
+  rotter. We want him to bring us back some water from the other
+  side, and I'd break his neck in ten minutes. You sit next him and
+  give him your motor car patter."</P>
+
+  <P>Therefore I took the middle seat and played chorus. The road
+  was not a bad one, as natural mountain roads go; I have myself
+  driven worse in California. Our man, however, liked to exaggerate
+  all the difficulties, and while doing it to point to himself with
+  pride as a perfect wonder. Between times he talked elementary
+  mechanics.</P>
+
+  <P>"The inflammation of the sparkling plugs?" was one of his
+  expressions that did much to compensate.</P>
+
+  <P>The country mounted steadily through the densest thorn scrub I
+  have ever seen. It was about fifteen feet high, and so thick that
+  its penetration, save by made tracks, would have been an absolute
+  impossibility. Our road ran like a lane between two spiky
+  jungles. Bold bright mountains cropped up, singly and in short
+  ranges, as far as the eye could see them.</P>
+
+  <P>This sort of thing for twenty miles&mdash;more than a hard
+  day's journey on safari. We made it in a little less than two
+  hours; and the breeze of our going kept us reasonably cool under
+  our awning. We began to appreciate the real value of our
+  diplomacy.</P>
+
+  <P>At noon we came upon a series of unexpectedly green and clear
+  small hills just under the frown of a sheer rock cliff. This
+  oasis in the thorn was occupied by a few scattered native huts
+  and the usual squalid Indian dukka, or trading store. At this
+  last our German friend stopped. From under the seat he drew out a
+  collapsible table and a basket of provisions. These we were
+  invited to share. Diplomacy's highest triumph!</P>
+
+  <P>After lunch we surmounted our first steep grade to the top of
+  a ridge. This we found to be the beginning of a long elevated
+  plateau sweeping gently downward to a distant heat mist, which
+  later experience proved a concealment to snowcapped Kilimanjaro.
+  This plateau also looked to be covered with scrub. As we
+  penetrated it, however, we found the bushes were more or less
+  scattered, while in the wide, shallow dips between the
+  undulations were open grassy meadows. There was no water.
+  Isolated mountains or peaked hills showed here and there in the
+  illimitable spaces, some of them fairly hull down, all of them
+  toilsomely distant. This was the Serengetti itself.</P>
+
+  <P>In this great extent of country somewhere were game herds.
+  They were exceedingly migratory, and nobody knew very much about
+  them. One of the species would be the rare and localized
+  fringe-eared oryx. This beast was the principal zoological end of
+  our expedition; though, of course, as always, we hoped for a
+  chance lion. Geographically we wished to find the source of the
+  Swanee River, and to follow that stream down to its joining with
+  the Tsavo. About half-past one we passed our safari boys. We had
+  intended to stop and replenish their canteens from our
+  water-drums; but they told us they had encountered a stray and
+  astonishing shower, and did not need more. We left them trudging
+  cheerfully across the desert. They had travelled most of the
+  night before, would do the same in the night to come, and should
+  reach our camping-place about noon of the next day.</P>
+
+  <P>We ourselves stopped about four o'clock. In a few hours we had
+  come a hard three days' march. Over the side went our goods. We
+  bade the German a very affectionate farewell; for he was still to
+  fill our drums from one of the streams out of Kilimanjaro and
+  deliver them to us on his return trip next day. We then all
+  turned to and made camp. The scrub desert here was exactly like
+  the scrub desert for the last sixty miles.</P>
+
+  <P>The next morning we were up and off before sunrise. In this
+  job time was a very large element of the contract. We must find
+  our fringe-eared oryx before our water supply gave out. Therefore
+  we had resolved not to lose a moment.</P>
+
+  <P>The sunrise was most remarkable&mdash;lace work, flat clouds,
+  with burnished copper-coloured clouds behind glowing through the
+  lace. We admired it for some few moments. Then one of us happened
+  to look higher. There, above the sky of the horizon, apparently
+  suspended in mid-air half-way to the zenith, hung like delicate
+  bubbles the double snow-cloud peaks of Kilimanjaro. Between them
+  and the earth we could apparently see clear sky. It was in
+  reality, of course, the blue-heat haze that rarely leaves these
+  torrid plains. I have seen many mountains in all parts of the
+  world, but none as fantastically insubstantial; as wonderfully
+  lofty; as gracefully able to yield, before clouds and storms and
+  sunrise glows, all the space in infinity they could possibly use,
+  and yet to tower above them serene in an upper space of its own.
+  Nearly every morning of our journey to come we enjoyed this
+  wonderful vision for an hour or so. Then the mists closed in. The
+  rest of the day showed us a grayish sky along the western
+  horizon, with apparently nothing behind it.</P>
+
+  <P>In the meantime we were tramping steadily ahead over the
+  desert; threading the thorn scrub, crossing the wide shallow
+  grass-grown swales; spying about us for signs of game. At the end
+  of three or four miles we came across some ostrich and four
+  hartebeeste. This encouraged us to think we might find other game
+  soon, for the hartebeeste is a gregarious animal. Suddenly we saw
+  a medium-sized squat beast that none of us recognized, trundling
+  along like a badger sixty yards ahead. Any creature not easily
+  identified is a scientific possibility in Africa. Therefore we
+  fired at once. One of the bullets hit his foreleg paw.
+  Immediately this astonishing small creature turned and charged
+  us! If his size had equalled his ferocity, he would have been a
+  formidable opponent. We had a lively few minutes. He rushed us
+  again and again, uttering ferocious growls. We had to step high
+  and lively to keep out of his way. Between charges he sat down
+  and tore savagely at his wounded paw. We wanted him as nearly
+  perfect a specimen as possible, so tried to rap him over the head
+  with a club. Owing to remarkably long teeth and claws, this was
+  soon proved impracticable; so we shot him. He weighed about fifty
+  pounds, and we subsequently learned that he was a honey badger,
+  an animal very rarely captured.</P>
+
+  <P>We left the boys to take the whole skin and skull of this
+  beast, and strolled forward slowly. The brush ended abruptly in a
+  wide valley. It had been burnt over, and the new grass was coming
+  up green. We gave one look, and sank back into cover.</P>
+
+  <P>The sparse game of the immediate vicinity had gathered to this
+  fresh feed. A herd of hartebeeste and gazelle were grazing, and
+  five giraffe adorned the sky-line. But what interested us
+  especially was a group of about fifty cob-built animals with the
+  unmistakable rapier horns of the oryx. We recognized them as the
+  rarity we desired.</P>
+
+  <P>The conditions were most unfavourable. The cover nearest them
+  gave a range of three hundred yards, and even this would bring
+  them directly between us and the rising sun. There was no help
+  for it, however. We made our way to the bushes nearest the herd,
+  and I tried to align the blurs that represented my sights. At the
+  shot, ineffective, they raced to the right across our front. We
+  lay low. As they had seen nothing they wheeled and stopped after
+  two hundred yards of flight. This shift had brought the light
+  into better position. Once more I could define my sights. From
+  the sitting position I took careful aim at the largest buck. He
+  staggered twenty feet and fell dead. The distance was just 381
+  paces. This shot was indeed fortunate, for we saw no more
+  fringe-eared oryx.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XXVII' id="XXVII"></A>
+
+  <H2>XXVII.</H2>
+
+  <P>ACROSS THE SERENGETTI.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>We arrived in camp about noon, almost exhausted with the
+  fierce heat and a six hours' tramp, to find our German friend
+  awaiting us. By an irony of fate the drums of water he had
+  brought back with him were now unnecessary; we had our oryx.
+  However, we wearily gave him lunch and listened to his prattle,
+  and finally sped him on his way, hoping never to see him
+  again.</P>
+
+  <P>About three o'clock our men came in. We doled out water
+  rations, and told them to rest in preparation for the morrow.</P>
+
+  <P>Late that night we were awakened by a creaking and snorting
+  and the flash of torches passing. We looked out, to see a donkey
+  transport toiling slowly along, travelling thus at night to avoid
+  the terrific day heats. The two-wheeled carts with their wild and
+  savage drivers looked very picturesque in the flickering lights.
+  We envied them vaguely their defined route that permitted night
+  travel, and sank to sleep.</P>
+
+  <P>In the morning, however, we found they had left with us new
+  responsibilities in the shape of an elderly Somali, very sick,
+  and down with the fever. This was indeed a responsibility. It was
+  manifestly impossible for us to remain there with him; we should
+  all die of thirst. It was equally impossible to take him with us,
+  for he was quite unfit to travel under the sun. Finally, as the
+  best solution of a bad business, we left him five gallons of
+  water, some food, and some quinine, together with the advice to
+  rest until night, and then to follow his companions along the
+  beaten track. What between illness and wild beasts his chances
+  did not look very good, but it was the best we could do for him.
+  This incident exemplifies well the cruelty of this singular
+  people. They probably abandoned the old man because his groans
+  annoyed them, or because one of them wanted to ride in his place
+  on the donkey cart.<A name='FNanchor_12_12' id=
+  "FNanchor_12_12"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_12_12'><SUP>[12]</SUP></A></P>
+
+  <P>We struck off as early as possible through the thorn scrub on
+  a compass bearing that we hoped would bring us to a reported
+  swamp at the head of the Swanee River. The Swanee River was one
+  of the sources of the Tsavo. Of course this was guesswork. We did
+  not know certainly the location of the swamp, its distance from
+  us, nor what lay between us and it. However, we loaded all our
+  transportable vessels with water, and set forth.</P>
+
+  <P>The scrub was all alike; sometimes thinner, sometimes thicker.
+  We marched by compass until we had raised a conical hill above
+  the horizon, and then we bore just to the left of that. The
+  surface of the ground was cut by thousands of game tracks. They
+  were all very old, however, made after a rain; and it was evident
+  the game herds venture into this country only when it contains
+  rainwater. After two hours, however, we did see one solitary
+  hartebeeste, whom we greeted as an old friend in desolation.
+  Shortly afterwards we ran across one oribi, which I shot for our
+  own table.</P>
+
+  <P>At the end of two hours we sat down. The safari of twenty men
+  was a very miscellaneous lot, consisting of the
+  rag-tag-and-bobtail of the bazaars picked up in a hurry. They
+  were soft and weak, and they straggled badly. The last
+  weakling&mdash;prodded along by one of our two
+  askaris&mdash;limped in only at the end of half an hour. Then we
+  took a new start.</P>
+
+  <P>The sun was by now up and hot. The work was difficult enough
+  at best, but the weight of the tropics was now cast in the scale.
+  Twice more within the next two hours we stopped to let every one
+  catch up. Each time this required a longer interval. In the thorn
+  it was absolutely essential to keep in touch with every member of
+  the party. A man once lost would likely remain so, for we could
+  not afford to endanger all for the sake of one.</P>
+
+  <P>Time wore on until noon. Had it not been for a thin film of
+  haze that now overspread the sky, I think the sun would have
+  proved too much for some of the men. Four or five straggled so
+  very badly that we finally left them in charge of one of our two
+  askaris, with instructions to follow on as fast as they could. In
+  order to make this possible, we were at pains to leave a
+  well-marked trail.</P>
+
+  <P>After this fashion, slowly, and with growing anxiety for some
+  of the men, we drew up on our landmark hill. There our
+  difficulties increased; the thorn brush thickened. Only by a
+  series of short zigzags, and by taking advantage of every rhino
+  trail going in our direction, could we make our way through it at
+  all; while to men carrying burdens on their heads the tangle
+  aloft must have been fairly maddening. So slow did our progress
+  necessarily become, and so difficult was it to keep in touch with
+  everybody, that F. and I finally halted for consultation. It was
+  decided that I should push on ahead with Memba Sasa to make
+  certain that we were not on the wrong line, while F. and the
+  askaris struggled with the safari.</P>
+
+  <P>Therefore I took my compass bearing afresh, and plunged into
+  the scrub. The sensation was of hitting solid ground after a long
+  walk through sand. We seemed fairly to shoot ahead and out of
+  sight. Whenever we came upon earth we marked it deeply with our
+  heels; we broke twigs downwards, and laid hastily-snatched
+  bunches of grass to help the trail we were leaving for the others
+  to follow. This, in spite of our compass, was a very devious
+  track. Besides, the thorn bushes were patches of spiky aloe
+  coming into red flower, and the spears of sisal.</P>
+
+  <P>After an hour's steady, swift walking the general trend of the
+  country began to slope downwards. This argued a watercourse
+  between us and the hills around Kilimanjaro. There could be no
+  doubt that we would cut it; the only question was whether it,
+  like so many desert watercourses, might not prove empty. We
+  pushed on the more rapidly. Then we caught a glimpse through a
+  chance opening, of the tops of trees below us. After another hour
+  we suddenly burst from the scrub to a strip of green grass beyond
+  which were the great trees, the palms, and the festooned vines of
+  a watercourse. Two bush bucks plunged into the thicket as we
+  approached, and fifteen or twenty mongooses sat up as straight
+  and stiff as so many picket pins the better to see us.</P>
+
+  <P>For a moment my heart sank. The low undergrowth beneath the
+  trees apparently swept unbroken from where we stood to the low
+  bank opposite. It was exactly like the shallow, damp but
+  waterless ravines at home, filled with black berry vines. We
+  pushed forward, however, and found ourselves looking down on a
+  smooth, swift flowing stream.</P>
+
+  <P>It was not over six feet wide, grown close with vines and
+  grasses, but so very deep and swift and quiet that an
+  extraordinary volume of water passed, as through an artificial
+  aqueduct. Furthermore, unlike most African streams, it was
+  crystal clear. We plunged our faces and wrists in it, and took
+  long, thankful draughts. It was all most grateful after the
+  scorching desert. The fresh trees meeting in canopy overhead were
+  full of monkeys and bright birds; festooned vines swung their
+  great ropes here and there; long heavy grass carpeted
+  underfoot.</P>
+
+  <P>After we had rested a few minutes we filled our empty
+  canteens, and prepared to start back for our companions. But
+  while I stood there, Memba Sasa&mdash;good, faithful Memba
+  Sasa&mdash;seized both canteens and darted away.</P>
+
+  <P>"Lie down!" he shouted back at me, "I will go back."</P>
+
+  <P>Without protest&mdash;which would have been futile
+  anyway&mdash;I sank down on the grass. I was very tired. A little
+  breeze followed the watercourse; the grass was soft; I would have
+  given anything for a nap. But in wild Africa a nap is not
+  healthy; so I drowsily watched the mongooses that had again come
+  out of seclusion, and the monkeys, and the birds. At the end of a
+  long time, and close to sundown, I heard voices. A moment later
+  F., Memba Sasa, and about three-quarters of the men came in. We
+  all, white and black, set to work to make camp. Then we built
+  smudges and fired guns in the faint hope of guiding in the
+  stragglers. As a matter of fact we had not the slightest faith in
+  these expedients. Unless the men were hopelessly lost they should
+  be able to follow our trail. They might be almost anywhere out in
+  that awful scrub. The only course open to them would be to climb
+  thorn trees for the night. Next day we would organize a formal
+  search for them.</P>
+
+  <P>In the meantime, almost dead from exhaustion, we sprawled
+  about everywhere. The men, too dispirited even to start their own
+  camp-fires, sat around resting as do boxers between rounds. Then
+  to us came Memba Sasa, who had already that day made a double
+  journey, and who should have been the most tired of all.</P>
+
+  <P>"Bwana," said he, "if you will lend me Winchi,<A name=
+  'FNanchor_13_13' id="FNanchor_13_13"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_13_13'><SUP>[13]</SUP></A> and a lantern, I will bring
+  in the men."</P>
+
+  <P>We lent him his requirements, and he departed. Hours later he
+  returned, carefully leaned "Winchi" in the corner of the tent,
+  deposited the lantern, and stood erect at attention.</P>
+
+  <P>"Well, Memba Sasa," I inquired.</P>
+
+  <P>"The men are here."</P>
+
+  <P>"They were far?"</P>
+
+  <P>"Very far."</P>
+
+  <P>"Verna, Memba Sasa, assanti sana."<A name='FNanchor_14_14' id=
+  "FNanchor_14_14"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_14_14'><SUP>[14]</SUP></A></P>
+
+  <P>That was his sole&mdash;and sufficient&mdash;reward.</P>
+
+  <P>FOOTNOTES:</P><A name='Footnote_12_12' id=
+  "Footnote_12_12"></A><A href='#FNanchor_12_12'>[12]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>I have just heard that this old man survived, and has been
+    singing our praises in Nairobi as the saviour of his life.</P>
+  </DIV><A name='Footnote_13_13' id="Footnote_13_13"></A><A href=
+  '#FNanchor_13_13'>[13]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>His name for the.405 Winchester.</P>
+  </DIV><A name='Footnote_14_14' id="Footnote_14_14"></A><A href=
+  '#FNanchor_14_14'>[14]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>"Very good, Memba Sasa, thanks very much."</P>
+  </DIV>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XXVIII' id="XXVIII"></A>
+
+  <H2>XXVIII.</H2>
+
+  <P>DOWN THE RIVER.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>Relieved now of all anxiety as to water, we had merely to make
+  our way downstream. First, however, there remained the
+  interesting task of determining its source.</P>
+
+  <P>Accordingly next day we and our gunbearers left the boys to a
+  well-earned rest, and set out upstream. At first we followed the
+  edge of the river jungle, tramping over hard hot earth, winding
+  in and out of growths of thorn scrub and brilliant aloes. We saw
+  a herd of impallas gliding like phantoms; and as we stood in need
+  of meat, I shot at one of them but missed. The air was very hot
+  and moist. At five o'clock in the morning the thermometer had
+  stood at 78 degrees; and by noon it had mounted to 106 degrees.
+  In addition the atmosphere was filled with the humidity that
+  later in the day was to break in extraordinary deluges. We moved
+  slowly, but even then our garments were literally dripping
+  wet.</P>
+
+  <P>At the end of three miles the stream bed widened. We came upon
+  beautiful, spacious, open lawns of from eighty to one hundred
+  acres apiece, separated from each other by narrow strips of tall
+  forest trees. The grass was high, and waved in the breeze like
+  planted grain; the boundary trees resembled artificial
+  wind-breaks of eucalyptus or Normandy poplar. One might expect a
+  white ranch house beyond some low clump of trees, and chicken
+  runs, and corrals.</P>
+
+  <P>Along these apparent boundaries of forest trees our stream
+  divided, and divided again, so that we were actually looking upon
+  what we had come to seek&mdash;the source of the Swanee branch of
+  the Tsavo River. In these peaceful, protected meadows was it
+  cradled. From them it sprang full size out into the African
+  wilderness.</P>
+
+  <P>A fine impalla buck grazed in one of these fields. I crept as
+  near him as I could behind one of the wind-break rows of trees.
+  It was not very near, and for the second time I missed. Thereupon
+  we decided two things: that we were not really meat hungry, and
+  that yesterday's hard work was not conducive to to-day's good
+  shooting.</P>
+
+  <P>Having thus accomplished the second object of our expedition,
+  we returned to camp. From that time begins a regular sequence of
+  events on which I look back with the keenest of pleasure. The two
+  constant factors were the river and the great dry country on
+  either side. Day after day we followed down the one, and we made
+  brief excursions out into the other. Each night we camped near
+  the sound of the swift running water, where the winds rustled in
+  the palms, the acacias made lacework across the skies, and the
+  jungle crouched in velvet blackness close to earth like a
+  beast.</P>
+
+  <P>Our life in its routine was regular; in its details bizarre
+  and full of the unexpected. Every morning we arose an hour before
+  day, and ate by lantern light and the gleam of fires. At the
+  first gray we were afoot and on the march. F. and I, with our
+  gunbearers, then pushed ahead down the river, leaving the men to
+  come along as fast or as slowly as they pleased. After about six
+  hours or so of marching, we picked out a good camp site, and lay
+  down to await the safari. By two o'clock in the afternoon camp
+  was made. Also it was very hot. After a light lunch we stripped
+  to the skin, lay on our cots underneath the mosquito canopies,
+  and tried to doze or read. The heat at this time of day was
+  blighting. About four o'clock, if we happened to be inspired by
+  energy, one or the other of us strolled out at right angles to
+  the stream to see what we could see. The evening was tepid and
+  beautiful. Bathed and pyjama-clad we lolled in our canvas chairs,
+  smoking, chatting or listening to the innumerable voices of the
+  night.</P>
+
+  <P>Such was the simple and almost invariable routine of our days.
+  But enriching it, varying it, disguising it even&mdash;as
+  rain-squalls, sunshine cloud shadow, and unexpected winds modify
+  the landscape so well known from a study window&mdash;were the
+  incredible incidents and petty adventures of African travel.</P>
+
+  <P>The topography of the river itself might be divided very
+  roughly into three: the headwater country down to its junction
+  with the Tsavo the palm-elephant-grass stretch, and the gorge and
+  hill district just before it crosses the rail road.</P>
+
+  <P>The headwater country is most beautiful The stream is not over
+  ten feet wide, but very deep, swift, and clear. It flows between
+  defined banks and is set in a narrow strip of jungle. In places
+  the bed widens out to a carpet of the greenest green grass sown
+  with flowers; at other places it offers either mysterious
+  thickets, spacious cathedrals, or snug bowers. Immediately beyond
+  the edge of this river jungle begins the thorn scrub, more or
+  less dense. Distant single mountains or buttes serve as landmarks
+  in a brush-grown, gently rising, strongly rolling country.
+  Occasional alluvial flats draw back to low cliffs not over twenty
+  feet high.</P>
+
+  <P>After the junction of the Tsavo, palms of various sorts
+  replace to a large extent the forest trees. Naturally also the
+  stream widens and flows more slowly. Outside the palms grow tall
+  elephant-grass and bush. Our marching had generally to be done in
+  the narrow, neutral space between these two growths. It was
+  pleasant enough, with the river snatching at the trailing
+  branches, and the birds and animals rustling away. Beyond the
+  elephant-grass flats low ridges ran down to the river, varying in
+  width, but carrying always with them the dense thorn. Between
+  them ran recesses, sometimes three or four hundred acres in
+  extent, high with elephant-grass or little trees like alders. So
+  much for the immediate prospect on our right as we marched.
+  Across the river to our left were huge riven mountains, with
+  great cliffs and ca&ntilde;ons. As we followed necessarily every
+  twist and turn of the river, sometimes these mountains were
+  directly ahead of us, then magically behind, so that we thought
+  we had passed them by. But the next hour threw them again across
+  our trail. The ideal path would, of course, have cut across all
+  the bends and ridges; but the thorn of the ridges and the
+  elephant-grass of the flats forbade it. So we marched ten miles
+  to gain four.</P>
+
+  <P>After days of struggle and deception we passed those
+  mountains. Then we entered a new type of country where the Tsavo
+  ran in ca&ntilde;ons between hills. The high cliffs often towered
+  far above us; we had to pick our way along narrow river ledges;
+  again the river ran like a trout stream over riffles and rapids,
+  while we sauntered along cleared banks beneath the trees. Had we
+  not been making a forced march under terrific heat at just that
+  time, this last phase of the river might have been the
+  pleasantest of all.</P>
+
+  <P>Throughout the whole course of our journey the rhinoceros was
+  the most abundant of the larger animals. The indications of old
+  tracks proved that at some time of the year, or under some
+  different conditions, great herds of the more gregarious plains
+  antelope and zebra visited the river, but at the time of our
+  visit they were absent. The rhinoceroses, however, in incredible
+  numbers came regularly to water. Paradoxically, we saw very few
+  of them, and enjoyed comparative immunity from their charges.
+  This was due to the fact that their habits and ours swung in
+  different orbits. The rhinoceros, after drinking, took to the
+  hot, dry thorn scrub in the low hills; and as he drank at night,
+  we rarely encountered him in the river bottoms where we were
+  marching. This was very lucky, for the cover was so dense that a
+  meeting must necessarily be at close quarters. Indeed these large
+  and truculent beasts were rather a help than a hindrance, for we
+  often made use of their wide, clear paths to penetrate some
+  particularly distressing jungle. However, we had several small
+  adventures with them: just enough to keep us alert in rounding
+  corners or approaching bushes&mdash;and nine-tenths of our travel
+  was bushes and corners. The big, flat footsteps, absolutely fresh
+  in the dust, padded methodically ahead of us down the only way
+  until it seemed that we could not fail to plump upon their maker
+  around the next bend. We crept forward foot by foot, every sense
+  alert, finger on trigger. Then after a time the spoor turned off
+  to the right, towards the hills. We straightened our backs and
+  breathed a sigh of relief. This happened over and over again. At
+  certain times of year also elephants frequent the banks of the
+  Tsavo in considerable numbers We saw many old signs, and once
+  came upon the fresh path of a small herd. The great beasts had
+  passed by that very morning. We gazed with considerable awe on
+  limbs snatched bodily from trees; on flat-topped acacias a foot
+  in diameter pulled up by the roots and stood up side down; on
+  tree trunks twisted like ropes.</P>
+
+  <P>Of the game by far the most abundant were the beautiful red
+  impalla. We caught glimpses of their graceful bodies gliding in
+  and out of sight through the bushes; or came upon them standing
+  in small openings, their delicate ears pointed to us. They and
+  the tiny dikdik furnished our table; and an occasional water-buck
+  satisfied the men. One day we came on one of the latter beasts
+  sound asleep in a tiny open space. He was lying down, and his
+  nose rested against the earth just like a very old family horse
+  in a paddock.</P>
+
+  <P>Besides these common species were bush-buck wart-hog, lesser
+  kudu, giraffe, and leopard. The bush-buck we jumped occasionally
+  quite near at hand. They ducked their heads low and rushed
+  tearingly to the next cover. The leopard was heard sighing every
+  night, and saw their pad marks next day; but only twice did we
+  catch glimpses of them. One morning we came upon the fresh-killed
+  carcass of a female lesser kudu from which, evidently, we had
+  driven the slayer.</P>
+
+  <P>These few species practically completed the game list. They
+  were sufficient for our needs; and the lesser kudu was a prize
+  much desired for our collection. But by far the most interesting
+  to me were the smaller animals, the birds, and the strange,
+  innumerable insects.</P>
+
+  <P>We saw no natives in the whole course of our journey.</P>
+
+  <P>The valley of the river harboured many monkeys. They seemed to
+  be of two species, blue and brown, but were equally noisy and
+  amusing. They retired ahead of our advance with many remarks, or
+  slipped past us to the rear without any comments whatever. When
+  we made camp they retired with indignant protests, and when we
+  had quite settled down they returned as near as they dared.</P>
+
+  <P>One very hot afternoon I lay on my canvas cot in the open,
+  staring straight upward into the overarching greenery of the
+  trees. This is a very pleasant thing to do. The beautiful
+  up-spreading, outstretching of the tree branches and twigs
+  intrigue the eye; the leaves make fascinating, hypnotically
+  waving patterns against a very blue sky; and in the chambers and
+  galleries of the upper world the birds and insects carry on
+  varied businesses of their own. After a time the corner of my eye
+  caught a quick movement far to the left and in a shadow. At once
+  I turned my attention that way. After minute scrutiny I at length
+  made out a monkey. Evidently considering himself quite
+  unobserved, he was slowly and with great care stalking our camp.
+  Inch by inch he moved, taking skilful advantage of every bit of
+  cover, flattening himself along the limbs, hunching himself up
+  behind bunches of leaves, until he had gained a big limb directly
+  overhead. There he stretched flat, staring down at the scene that
+  had so strongly aroused his curiosity. I lay there for over two
+  hours reading and dozing. My friend aloft never stirred. When
+  dusk fell he was still there. Some time after dark he must have
+  regained his band, for in the morning the limb was vacant.</P>
+
+  <P>Now comes the part of this story that really needs a witness,
+  not to veracity perhaps, but to accuracy of observations.
+  Fortunately I have F. About noon next day the monkey returned to
+  his point of observation. He used the same precautions as to
+  concealment; he followed his route of the day before; he
+  proceeded directly to his old conning tower on the big limb. It
+  did not take him quite so long to get there, for he had already
+  scouted out the trail. <I>And close at his heels followed two
+  other monkeys</I>! They crawled where he crawled; they crouched
+  where he crouched; they hid where he hid; they flattened
+  themselves out by him on the big limb, and all three of them
+  passed the afternoon gazing down on the strange and fascinating
+  things below. Whether these newcomers were part of the first
+  one's family out for a treat, or whether they were Cook's
+  Tourists of the Jungle in charge of my friend's competence as a
+  guide, I do not know.</P>
+
+  <P>Farther down the river F. and I stopped for some time to watch
+  the crossing of forty-odd of the little blue monkeys. The whole
+  band clambered to near the top of a tall tree growing by the
+  water's edge. There, one by one, they ran out on a straight
+  overhanging limb and cast themselves into space. On the opposite
+  bank of the river, and leaning well out, grew a small springy
+  bush. Each monkey landed smash in the middle of this, clasped it
+  with all four hands, swayed alarmingly, recovered, and scampered
+  ashore. It was rather a nice problem in ballistics this, for a
+  mistake in calculation of a foot in distance or a pound in push
+  would land Mr. Monkey in the water. And the joke of it was that
+  directly beneath that bush lay two hungry-looking crocodiles! As
+  each tiny body hurtled through the air I'll swear a look of hope
+  came into the eyes of those crocs. We watched until the last had
+  made his leap. There were no mistakes. The joke was against the
+  crocodiles.</P>
+
+  <P>We encountered quite a number of dog-faced baboons. These big
+  apes always retreated very slowly and noisily. Scouts in the
+  rearguard were continually ascending small trees or bushes for a
+  better look at us, then leaping down to make disparaging remarks.
+  One lot seemed to show such variation in colour from the usual
+  that we shot one. The distance was about two hundred and fifty
+  yards. Immediately the whole band&mdash;a hundred or so
+  strong&mdash;dropped on all fours and started in our direction.
+  This was rather terrifying. However, as we stood firm, they
+  slowly came to a halt at about seventy yards, barked and
+  chattered for a moment, then hopped away to right and left.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XXIX' id="XXIX"></A>
+
+  <H2>XXIX.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE LESSER KUDU.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>About eight o'clock, the evening of our first day on the
+  Swanee, the heat broke in a tropical downpour. We heard it coming
+  from a long distance, like the roar of a great wind. The velvet
+  blackness, star hung, was troubled by an invisible blurring mist,
+  evidenced only through a subtle effect on the subconsciousness.
+  Every leaf above us, in the circle of our firelight, depended
+  absolutely motionless from its stem. The insects had ceased their
+  shrilling; the night birds their chirping; the animals, great and
+  small, their callings or their stealthy rustling to and fro. Of
+  the world of sound there remained only the crackling of our
+  fires, the tiny singing of the blood in our ears, and that
+  far-off portentous roar. Our simple dispositions were made.
+  Trenches had been dug around the tents; the pegs had been driven
+  well home; our stores had been put in shelter. We waited
+  silently, puffing away our pipes.</P>
+
+  <P>The roaring increased in volume. Beneath it we began to hear
+  the long, rolling crash of thunder. Overhead the stars, already
+  dimmed, were suddenly blotted from existence. Then came the rain,
+  in a literal deluge, as though the god of floods had turned over
+  an entire reservoir with one twist of his mighty hand. Our fire
+  went out instantly; the whole world went out with it. We lay on
+  our canvas cots unable to see a foot beyond our tent opening;
+  unable to hear anything but the insistent, terrible drumming over
+  our heads; unable to think of anything through the tumult of
+  waters. As a man's body might struggle from behind a waterfall
+  through the torrents, so our imaginations, half drowned, managed
+  dimly to picture forth little bits&mdash;the men huddled close in
+  their tiny tents, their cowled blankets over their heads. All the
+  rest of the universe had gone.</P>
+
+  <P>After a time the insistent beat and rush of waters began to
+  wear through our patience. We willed that this wracking tumult
+  should cease; we willed it with all the force that was in us.
+  Then, as this proved vain, we too humped our spiritual backs,
+  cowled our souls with patience, and waited dumbly for the force
+  of the storm to spend itself. Our faculties were quite as
+  effectually drowned out by the unceasing roar and crash of the
+  waters as our bodily comfort would have been had we lacked the
+  protection of our tent.</P>
+
+  <P>Abruptly the storm passed. It did not die away slowly in the
+  diminuendo of ordinary storms. It ceased as though the reservoir
+  had been tipped back again. The rapid <I>drip</I>, <I>drip</I>,
+  <I>drip</I> of waters now made the whole of sound; all the rest
+  of the world lay breathless. Then, inside our tent, a cricket
+  struck up bravely.</P>
+
+  <P>This homely, cheerful little sound roused us. We went forth to
+  count damages and to put our house in order. The men hunted out
+  dry wood and made another fire; the creatures of the jungle and
+  the stars above them ventured forth.</P>
+
+  <P>Next morning we marched into a world swept clean. The ground
+  was as smooth as though a new broom had gone over it. Every track
+  now was fresh, and meant an animal near at hand. The bushes and
+  grasses were hung with jewels. Merry little showers shook down
+  from trees sharing a joke with some tiny wind. White steam rose
+  from a moist, fertile-looking soil. The smell of greenhouses was
+  in the air. Looking back, we were stricken motionless by the
+  sight of Kilimanjaro, its twin peaks suspended a clean blue sky,
+  fresh snow mantling its shoulders.</P>
+
+  <P>This day, so cheeringly opened, was destined to fulfil its
+  promise. In the dense scrub dwell a shy and rare animal called
+  the lesser kudu specimens of which we greatly desired. The beast
+  keeps to the thickest and driest cove where it is impossible to
+  see fifty yards ahead but where the slightest movement breaks the
+  numberless dry interlacements of which the place seems made. To
+  move really quietly one could not cover over a half-mile in an
+  hour. As the countryside extends a thousand square miles or more,
+  and the lesser kudu is rare, it can be seen that hunting them
+  might have to be a slow and painful process. We had twice seen
+  the peculiar tracks.</P>
+
+  <P>On this morning, however, we caught a glimpse of the beast
+  itself. A flash of gray, with an impression of the characteristic
+  harness-like stripes&mdash;that was all. The trail, in the
+  ground, was of course very plain. I left the others and followed
+  it into the brush. As usual the thorn scrub was so thick that I
+  had to stoop and twist to get through it at all, and so brittle
+  that the least false move made a crackling like a fire. The rain
+  of the night before had, however, softened the
+  <I>d&eacute;bris</I> lying on the ground. I moved forward as
+  quickly as I could, half suffocated in the steaming heat of the
+  dense thicket. After three or four hundred yards the beast fell
+  into a walk, so I immediately halted. I reasoned that after a few
+  steps at this gait he would look back to see whether or not he
+  was followed. If his scouting showed him nothing he might throw
+  off suspicion. After ten minutes I crept forward again. The spoor
+  showed my surmises to be correct, for I came to where the animal
+  had turned, behind a small bush, and had stood for a few minutes.
+  Taking up the tracks from this point, I was delighted to find
+  that the kudu had forgotten its fear, and was browsing. At the
+  end of five minutes more of very careful work, I was fortunate
+  enough to see it, feeding from the top of a small bush
+  thirty-five yards away. The raking shot from the Springfield
+  dropped it in its tracks.</P>
+
+  <P>It proved to be a doe, a great prize of course, but not to be
+  compared with the male. We skinned her carefully, and moved on,
+  delighted to have the species.</P>
+
+  <P>Our luck was not over, however. At the end of six hours we
+  picked our camp in a pretty grove by the swift-running stream.
+  There we sat down to await the safari. The tree-tops were full of
+  both the brown and blue monkeys, baboons barked at us from a
+  distance, the air was musical with many sweet birds. Big
+  thunder-clouds were gathering around the horizon.</P>
+
+  <P>The safari came in. Mohammed immediately sought us out to
+  report, in great excitement, that he had seen five kudu across
+  the stream. He claimed to have watched them even after the safari
+  had passed, and that they had not been alarmed. The chance was
+  slight that the kudu could be found, but still it was a chance.
+  Accordingly we rather reluctantly gave up our plans for a loaf
+  and a nap. Mohammed said the place was an hour back; we had had
+  six hours march already. However, about two o'clock we set out.
+  Before we had arrived quite at the spot we caught a glimpse of
+  the five kudu as they dashed across a tiny opening ahead of us.
+  They had moved downstream and crossed the river.</P>
+
+  <P>It seemed rather hopeless to follow them into that thick
+  country once they had been alarmed, but the prize was great.
+  Therefore Memba Sasa and I took up the trail. We crept forward a
+  mile, very quiet, very tense&mdash;very sweaty. Then
+  simultaneously, through a chance opening and a long distance
+  away, we caught a patch of gray with a single transverse white
+  stripe. There was no chance to ascertain the sex of the beast,
+  nor what part of its anatomy was thus exposed. I took a bull's
+  eye chance on that patch of gray; had the luck to hit it in the
+  middle. The animal went down. Memba Sasa leapt forward like a
+  madman; I could not begin to keep pace with him. When I had
+  struggled through the thorn, I found him dancing with
+  delight.</P>
+
+  <P>"Monuome, bwana! buck, master!" he cried as soon as he saw me,
+  and made a spiral gesture in imitation of the male's beautiful
+  corkscrew horns.</P>
+
+  <P>While the men prepared the trophy, F. and I followed on after
+  the other four to see what they would do, and speedily came to
+  the conclusion that we were lucky to land two of the wily beasts.
+  The four ran compactly together and in a wide curve for several
+  hundred yards. Then two faced directly back, while the other two,
+  one on either side, made a short detour out and back to guard the
+  flanks.</P>
+
+  <P>We did not get back to camp until after dark. A tremendous
+  pair of electric storms were volleying and roaring at each other
+  across the space of night; leopards were crying; a pack of wild
+  dogs were barking vociferously. The camp, as we approached it,
+  was a globe of light in a bower of darkness. The fire, shining
+  and flickering on the under sides of the leaves, lent them a
+  strangely unreal stage-like appearance; the porters, their
+  half-naked bodies and red blankets catching the blaze, roasted
+  huge chunks of meat over little fires.</P>
+
+  <P>We ate a belated supper in comfort, peace, and satisfaction.
+  Then the storms joined forces and fell upon us.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XXX' id="XXX"></A>
+
+  <H2>XXX.</H2>
+
+  <P>ADVENTURES BY THE WAY.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>We journeyed slowly on down the stream. Interesting things
+  happened to us. The impressions of that journey are of two sorts:
+  the little isolated details and the general background of our
+  day's routine, with the gray dawn, the great heats of the day,
+  the blessed evening and its fireflies; the thundering of heaven's
+  artillery, and the downpour of torrents; the hot, high, crackling
+  thorn scrub into which we made excursions; the swift-flowing
+  river with its palms and jungles; outleaning palms trailing their
+  fronds just within the snatch of the flood waters; wide flats in
+  the embrace of the river bends, or extending into the low hills,
+  grown thick with lush green and threaded with rhinoceros paths;
+  the huge sheer cliff mountains over the way; distant single hills
+  far down. The mild discomfort of the start before daylight
+  clearly revealed the thorns and stumbling blocks; the buoyant
+  cheerfulness of the first part of the day, with the grouse
+  rocketing straight up out of the elephant grass, the birds
+  singing everywhere, and the beasts of the jungle still a-graze at
+  the edges; the growing weight of the sun, as though a great
+  pressing hand were laid upon the shoulders; the suffocating,
+  gasping heat of afternoon, and the; gathering piling black and
+  white clouds; the cool evening in pyjamas with the fireflies
+  flickering; among the bushes, the river singing, and little;
+  breezes wandering like pattering raindrops in the dry palm
+  leaves&mdash;all these, by repetition of main elements, blend in
+  my memory to form a single image. To be sure each day the rock
+  pinnacles over the way changed slightly their compass bearings,
+  and little variations of contour lent variety to the procession
+  of days. But in essentials they were of one kin.</P>
+
+  <P>But here and there certain individual scenes and incidents
+  stand out clearly and alone. Without reference to my notebook I
+  could not tell you their chronological order, nor the days of
+  their happening. They occurred, without correlation.</P>
+
+  <P>Thus one afternoon at the loafing hour, when F. was sound
+  asleep under his mosquito bar, and I in my canvas chair was
+  trying to catch the breeze from an approaching deluge, to me came
+  a total stranger in a large turban. He was without arms or
+  baggage of any sort, an alien in a strange and savage
+  country.</P>
+
+  <P>"Jambo, bwana m'kubwa (greeting, great master)!" said he.</P>
+
+  <P>"Jambo," said I, as though his existence were not in the least
+  surprising, and went on reading. This showed him that I was
+  indeed a great master.</P>
+
+  <P>After a suitable interval I looked up.</P>
+
+  <P>"Wataka neenee (what do you want)?" I demanded.</P>
+
+  <P>"Nataka sema qua heri (I want to say good-bye)," said this
+  astonishing individual.</P>
+
+  <P>I had, until that moment, been quite unaware of his existence.
+  As he had therefore not yet said "How do you do," I failed to
+  fathom his reasons for wanting to say "good-bye." However, far be
+  it from me to deny any one innocent pleasure, so I gravely bade
+  him good-bye, and he disappeared into the howling wilderness
+  whence he had come.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 45%;'>
+
+  <P>One afternoon we came upon two lemurs seated gravely side by
+  side on a horizontal limb ten feet up a thorn tree. They
+  contemplated us with the preternatural gravity of very young
+  children, and without the slightest sign of fear. We coveted them
+  as pets for Billy, but soon discovered that their apparent
+  tameness was grounded on good, solid common sense. The thorns of
+  that thorn tree! We left them sitting upright, side by side.</P>
+
+  <P>A little farther on, and up a dry earthy hillside, a
+  medium-sized beast leapt from an eroded place fairly under my
+  feet and made off with a singularly familiar kiyi. It was a
+  strange-looking animal, apparently brick red in colour. When I
+  had collected myself I saw it was a wild dog. It had been asleep
+  in a warm hollow of red clay, and had not awakened until I was
+  fairly upon it. We had heard these beasts nearly every night, but
+  this was the first we had seen. Some days later we came upon the
+  entire pack drinking at the river. They leapt suddenly across our
+  front eighty yards away, their heads all turned towards us
+  truculently, barking at us like so many watch dogs. They made
+  off, but not as though particularly alarmed.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 45%;'>
+
+  <P>One afternoon I had wounded a good wart-hog across the river,
+  and had gone downstream to find a dry way over. F., more
+  enthusiastic, had plunged in and promptly attacked the wart-hog.
+  He was armed with the English service revolver shooting the.455
+  Ely cartridge. It is a very short, stubby bit of ammunition. I
+  had often cast doubt on its driving power as compared to the.45
+  Colt, for example. F., as a loyal Englishman, had, of course,
+  defended his army's weapon. When I reached the centre of
+  disturbance I found that F. had emptied his revolver three
+  times&mdash;eighteen shots&mdash;into the head and forequarters
+  of that wart-hog without much effect. Incidentally the wart-hog
+  had given him a good lively time, charging again and again. The
+  weapon has not nearly the shock power of even our.38
+  service&mdash;a cartridge classified as too light for serious
+  business.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 45%;'>
+
+  <P>One afternoon I gave my shotgun to one of the porters to carry
+  afield, remarking facetiously to all and sundry that he looked
+  like a gunbearer. After twenty minutes we ran across a
+  rhinoceros. I spent some time trying to manoeuvre into position
+  for a photograph of the beast. However, the attempt failed. We
+  managed to dodge his rush. Then, after the excitement had died,
+  we discovered the porter and the shotgun up a tree. He descended
+  rather shamefaced. Nobody said anything about it. A half-hour
+  later we came upon another rhinoceros. The beast was visible at
+  some distance, and downhill. Nevertheless the porter moved a
+  little nearer a tree. This was too much for Memba Sasa. All the
+  rest of the afternoon he "ragged" that porter in much the same
+  terms we would have employed in the same circumstances.</P>
+
+  <P>"That place ahead," said he, "looks like a good place for
+  rhinoceros. Perhaps you'd better climb a tree."</P>
+
+  <P>"There is a dikdik; a bush is big enough to climb for
+  him."</P>
+
+  <P>"Are you afraid of jackals, too?"</P>
+  <HR style='width: 45%;'>
+
+  <P>The fireflies were our regular evening companions. We caught
+  one or two of them for the pleasure of watching them alternately
+  igniting and extinguishing their little lamps. Even when we put
+  them in a bottle they still kept up their performance
+  bravely.</P>
+
+  <P>But besides them we had an immense variety of evening
+  visitors. Beetles of the most inconceivable shapes and colours,
+  all sorts of moths, and numberless strange things&mdash;leaf
+  insects, walking-stick insects (exactly like dry twigs), and the
+  fierce, tall, praying mantis with their mock air of meekness and
+  devotion. Let one of the other insects stray within reach and
+  their piety was quickly enough abandoned! One beetle about
+  three-eighths of an inch across was oblong in shape and of pure
+  glittering gold. His wing covers, on the other hand, were round
+  and transparent. The effect was of a jewel under a tiny glass
+  case. Other beetles were of red dotted with black, or of black
+  dotted with red; they sported stripes, or circles of plain
+  colours; they wore long, slender antennae, or short knobby horns;
+  they carried rapiers or pinchers, long legs or short. In fact
+  they ran the gamut of grace and horror, so that an inebriate
+  would find here a great rest for the imagination.</P>
+
+  <P>After we had gone to bed we noticed more pleasantly our
+  cricket. He piped up, you may remember, the night of the first
+  great storm. That evening he took up his abode in some fold or
+  seam of our tent, and there stayed throughout all the rest of the
+  journey. Every evening he tuned up cheerfully, and we dropped to
+  sleep to the sound of his homelike piping. We grew very fond of
+  him, as one does of everything in this wild and changing country
+  that can represent a stable point of habitude.</P>
+
+  <P>Nor must I forget one evening when all of a sudden out of the
+  darkness came a tremendous hollow booming, like the beating of
+  war drums or the bellowing of some strange great beast. At length
+  we identified the performer as an unfamiliar kind of frog!</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XXXI' id="XXXI"></A>
+
+  <H2>XXXI.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE LOST SAFARI.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>We were possessed of a map of sorts, consisting mostly of wide
+  blank spaces, with an occasional tentative mountain, or the
+  probable course of streams marked thereon. The only landmark that
+  interested us was a single round peak situated south of our river
+  and at a point just before we should cross the railroad at Tsavo
+  Station. There came a day when, from the top of a hill where we
+  had climbed for the sake of the outlook, we thought we recognized
+  that peak. It was about five miles away as the crow flies.</P>
+
+  <P>Then we returned to camp and made the fatal mistake of
+  starting to figure. We ought to cover the distance, even with the
+  inevitable twists and turns, in a day; the tri-weekly train
+  passed through Tsavo the following night; if we could catch that
+  we would save a two days' wait for the next train. You follow the
+  thought. We arose very early the next morning to get a good start
+  on our forced march.</P>
+
+  <P>There is no use in spinning out a sad tale. We passed what we
+  thought must be our landmark hill just eleven times. The map
+  showed only one butte; as a matter of fact there were dozens. At
+  each disappointment we had to reconstruct our theories. It is the
+  nature of man to do this hopefully&mdash;Tsavo Station must be
+  just around the <I>next</I> bend. We marched six hours without
+  pause; then began to save ourselves a little. By all the gods of
+  logical reasoning we <I>proved</I> Tsavo just beyond a certain
+  fringe of woods. When we arrived we found that there the river
+  broke through a range of hills by way of a deep gorge. It was a
+  change from the everlasting scrub, with its tumbling waters, its
+  awful cliffs, its luxuriant tropical growths; but it was so much
+  the more difficult to make our way through. Beyond the gorge we
+  found any amount of hills, kopjes, buttes, sugar loaves, etc.,
+  each isolated from its fellows, each perfectly competent to serve
+  as the map's single landmark.</P>
+
+  <P>We should have camped, but we were very anxious to catch that
+  train; and we were convinced that now, after all that work, Tsavo
+  could not be far away. It would be ridiculous and mortifying to
+  find we had camped almost within sight of our destination!</P>
+
+  <P>The heat was very bad and the force of the sun terrific. It
+  seemed to possess actual physical weight, and to press us down
+  from above. We filled our canteens many times at the
+  swift-running stream, and emptied them as often. By two o'clock
+  F. was getting a little wobbly from the sun. We talked of
+  stopping, when an unexpected thunder shower rolled out from
+  behind the mountains, and speedily overcast the entire heavens.
+  This shadow relieved the stress. F., much revived, insisted that
+  we proceed. So we marched and passed many more hills.</P>
+
+  <P>In the meantime it began to rain, after the whole-hearted
+  tropical fashion. In two minutes we were drenched to the skin. I
+  kept my matches and notebook dry by placing them in the crown of
+  my cork helmet. After the intense heat this tepid downpour seemed
+  to us delicious.</P>
+
+  <P>And then, quite unexpectedly, of course, we came around a bend
+  to make out through the sheets of rain the steel girders of the
+  famous Tsavo bridge.<A name='FNanchor_15_15' id=
+  "FNanchor_15_15"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_15_15'><SUP>[15]</SUP></A></P>
+
+  <P>We clambered up a steep, slippery bank to the right-of-way,
+  along which we proceeded half a mile to the station. This
+  consisted of two or three native huts, a house for the East
+  Indian in charge, and the station building itself. The latter was
+  a small frame structure with a narrow floorless veranda. There
+  was no platform. Drawing close on all sides was the interminable
+  thorn scrub. Later, when the veil of rain had been drawn aside,
+  we found that Tsavo, perched on a hillside, looked abroad over a
+  wide prospect. For the moment all we saw was a dark, dismal,
+  dripping station, wherein was no sign of life.</P>
+
+  <P>We were beginning to get chilly, and we wanted very much some
+  tea, fire, a chance to dry, pending the arrival of our safari. We
+  jerked open the door and peered into the inky interior.</P>
+
+  <P>"Babu!" yelled F., "Babu!"</P>
+
+  <P>From an inner back room came the faint answer in most precise
+  English,&mdash;</P>
+
+  <P>"I can-not come; I am pray-ing."</P>
+
+  <P>There followed the sharp, quick tinkle of a little
+  bell&mdash;the Indian manner of calling upon the Lord's
+  attention.</P>
+
+  <P>We both knew better than to hustle the institutions of the
+  East; so we waited with what patience we had, listening to the
+  intermittent tinkling of the little bell. At the end of fully
+  fifteen minutes the devotee appeared. He proved to be a mild,
+  deprecating little man, very eager to help, but without
+  resources. He was a Hindu, and lived mainly on tea and rice. The
+  rice was all out, but he expected more on the night train. There
+  was no trading store here. He was the only inhabitant. After a
+  few more answers he disappeared, to return carrying two pieces of
+  letter paper on which were tea and a little coarse native sugar.
+  These, with a half-dozen very small potatoes, were all he had to
+  offer.</P>
+
+  <P>It did not look very encouraging. We had absolutely nothing in
+  which to boil water. Of course we could not borrow of our host;
+  caste stood in the way there. If we were even to touch one of his
+  utensils, that utensil was for him defiled for ever.
+  Nevertheless, as we had eaten nothing since four o'clock that
+  morning, and had put a hard day's work behind us, we made an
+  effort. After a short search we captured a savage possessed of a
+  surfuria, or native cooking pot. Memba Sasa scrubbed this with
+  sand. First we made tea in it, and drank turn about, from its
+  wide edge. This warmed us up somewhat. Then we dumped in our few
+  potatoes and a single guinea fowl that F. had decapitated earlier
+  in the day. We ate; and passed the pot over to Memba Sasa.</P>
+
+  <P>So far, so good; but we were still very wet, and the
+  uncomfortable thought would obtrude itself that the safari might
+  not get in that day. It behoved us at least to dry what we had
+  on. I hunted up Memba Sasa, whom I found in a native hut. A fire
+  blazed in the middle of the floor. I stooped low to enter, and
+  squatted on my heels with the natives. Slowly I steamed off the
+  surface moisture. We had rather a good time chatting and
+  laughing. After a while I looked out. It had stopped raining.
+  Therefore I emerged and set some of the men collecting firewood.
+  Shortly I had a fine little blaze going under the veranda roof of
+  the station. F. and I hung out our breeches to dry, and spread
+  the tails of our shirts over the heat. F. was actually the human
+  chimney, for the smoke was pouring in clouds from the breast and
+  collar of his shirt. We were fine figures for the public platform
+  of a railway station!</P>
+
+  <P>We had just about dried off and had reassumed our thin and
+  scanty garments, when the babu emerged. We stared in drop-jawed
+  astonishment. He had muffled his head and mouth in a most
+  brilliant scarf, as if for zero weather; although dressed
+  otherwise in the usual pongee. Under one arm he carried a folded
+  clumsy cotton umbrella; around his waist he had belted a huge
+  knife; in his other hand he carried his battle-axe. I mean just
+  that&mdash;his battle-axe. We had seen such things on tapestries
+  or in museums, but did not dream that they still existed out of
+  captivity. This was an Oriental looking battle-axe with a handle
+  three feet long, a spike on top, a spike out behind, and a
+  half-moon blade in front. The babu had with a little of his
+  signal paint done the whole thing, blade and all, to a brilliant
+  window-shutter green.</P>
+
+  <P>As soon as we had recovered our breath, we asked him very
+  politely the reason for these stupendous preparations. It seemed
+  that it was his habit to take a daily stroll just before sunset,
+  "for the sake of the health," as he told us in his accurate
+  English.</P>
+
+  <P>"The bush is full of bad men," he explained, "who would like
+  to kill me; but when they see this axe and this knife they say to
+  each other, 'There walks a very bad man. We dare not kill
+  him.'"</P>
+
+  <P>He marched very solemnly a quarter-mile up the track and back,
+  always in plain view. Promptly on his return he dived into his
+  little back room where the periodic tinkling of his praying bell
+  for some time marked his gratitude for having escaped the "bad
+  men."</P>
+
+  <P>The bell ceased. Several times he came to the door, eyed us
+  timidly, and bolted back into the darkness. Finally he approached
+  to within ten feet, twisted his hands and giggled in a most
+  deprecating fashion.</P>
+
+  <P>"What is the use of this killing game?" he gabbled as rapidly
+  as he could. "Man should not destroy what man cannot first
+  create." After which he giggled again and fled.</P>
+
+  <P>His conscience, evidently, had driven him to this defiance of
+  our high mightinesses against his sense of politeness and his
+  fears.</P>
+
+  <P>About this time my boy Mohammed and the cook drifted in. They
+  reported that they had left the safari not far back. Our hopes of
+  supper and blankets rose. They declined, however, with the
+  gathering darkness, and were replaced by wrath against the
+  faithless ones. Memba Sasa, in spite of his long day, took a gun
+  and disappeared in the darkness. He did not get back until nine
+  o'clock, when he suddenly appeared in the doorway to lean the gun
+  in the corner, and to announce, "Hapana safari."</P>
+
+  <P>We stretched ourselves on a bench and a table&mdash;the floor
+  was impossible&mdash;and took what sleep we could. In the small
+  hours the train thundered through, the train we had hoped to
+  catch!</P>
+
+  <P>FOOTNOTES:</P><A name='Footnote_15_15' id=
+  "Footnote_15_15"></A><A href='#FNanchor_15_15'>[15]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>This is the point at which construction was stopped by
+    man-eating lions. See Patterson's "The Man-eaters of
+    Tsavo."</P>
+  </DIV>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XXXII' id="XXXII"></A>
+
+  <H2>XXXII.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE BABU.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>We stretched ourselves stiffly in the first gray of dawn,
+  wondering where we could get a mouthful of breakfast. On emerging
+  from the station a strange and gladsome sight met our
+  eyes&mdash;namely, chop boxes and gun cases belonging to some
+  sportsman not yet arrived. Necessity knows no law; so we promptly
+  helped ourselves to food and gun-cleaning implements. Much
+  refreshed, we lit our pipes and settled ourselves to wait for our
+  delinquents.</P>
+
+  <P>Shortly after sunrise an Indian track inspector trundled in on
+  a handcar propelled by two natives. He was a suave and corpulent
+  person with a very large umbrella and beautiful silken garments.
+  The natives upset the handcar off the track, and the newcomer
+  settled himself for an enjoyable morning. He and the babu
+  discussed ethics and metaphysical philosophy for three solid
+  hours. Evidently they came from different parts of India, and
+  their only common language was English. Through the thin
+  partition in the station building we could hear plainly every
+  word. It was very interesting. Especially did we chortle with
+  delight when the inspector began one of his arguments somewhat as
+  follows:&mdash;</P>
+
+  <P>"Now the two English who are here. They possess great sums of
+  wealth"&mdash;F. nudged me delightedly&mdash;"and they have
+  weapons to kill, and much with which to do things, yet their
+  savage minds&mdash;"</P>
+
+  <P>It was plain, rank, eavesdropping, but most illuminating, thus
+  to get at first hand the Eastern point of view as to ourselves;
+  to hear the bloodless, gentle shell of Indian philosophy
+  described by believers. They discussed the most minute and
+  impractical points, and involved themselves in the most
+  uncompromising dilemmas.</P>
+
+  <P>Thus the gist of one argument was as follows: "All sexual
+  intercourse is sin, but the race must go forward by means of
+  sexual intercourse; therefore the race is conceived in sin and is
+  sinful; but it is a great sin for me, as an individual, not to
+  carry forward the race, since the Divine Will decrees that in
+  some way the race is necessary to it. <I>Therefore</I> it would
+  seem that man is in sin whichever way you look at it&mdash;"</P>
+
+  <P>"But," interposes the inspector firmly but politely, "is it
+  not possible that sexual sin and the sin of opposing Divine Will
+  may be of balance in the spirit, so that in resisting one sort a
+  man acquires virtue to commit the other without harm&mdash;" And
+  so on for hours.</P>
+
+  <P>At twelve-thirty the safari drifted in. Consider that fact and
+  what it meant. The plain duty of the headman was, of course, to
+  have seen that the men followed us in the day before. But
+  allowing, for the sake of argument, that this was impossible, and
+  that the men had been forced by the exhaustion of some of their
+  number to stop and camp, if they had arisen betimes they should
+  have completed the journey in two hours at most. That should have
+  brought them in by half-past seven or eight o'clock. But a noon
+  arrival condemned them without the necessity of argument. They
+  had camped early, had risen very, very late, and had dawdled on
+  the road.</P>
+
+  <P>We ourselves gave the two responsible headmen twenty lashes
+  apiece; then turned over to them the job of thrashing the rest.
+  Ten per man was the allotment. They expected the punishment; took
+  it gracefully. Some even thanked us when it was over! The babu
+  disappeared in his station.</P>
+
+  <P>About an hour later he approached us, very deprecating, and
+  handed us a telegram. It was from the district commissioner at
+  Voi ordering us to report for flogging "porters on the Tsavo
+  Station platform."</P>
+
+  <P>"I am truly sorry, I am truly sorry," the babu was murmuring
+  at our elbows.</P>
+
+  <P>"What does this mean?" we demanded of him.</P>
+
+  <P>He produced a thick book.</P>
+
+  <P>"It is in here&mdash;the law," he explained. "You must not
+  flog men on the station platform. It was my duty to report."</P>
+
+  <P>"How did we know that? Why didn't you tell us?"</P>
+
+  <P>"If you had gone there"&mdash;he pointed ten feet away to a
+  spot exactly like all other spots&mdash;"it would have been off
+  the platform. Then I had nothing to say."</P>
+
+  <P>We tried to become angry.</P>
+
+  <P>"But why in blazes couldn't you have told us of that quietly
+  and decently? We'd have moved."</P>
+
+  <P>"It is the law" He tapped his thick book.</P>
+
+  <P>"But we cannot be supposed to know by heart every law in that
+  book. Why didn't you warn us before reporting?" we insisted.</P>
+
+  <P>"I am truly sorry," he repeated. "I hope and trust it will not
+  prove serious. But it is in the book."</P>
+
+  <P>We continued in the same purposeless fashion for a moment or
+  so longer. Then the babu ended the discussion thus,&mdash;</P>
+
+  <P>"It was my duty. I am truly sorry. Suppose I had not reported
+  and should die to-day, and should go to heaven, and God should
+  ask me, 'Have you done your duty to-day?' what should I say to
+  Him?"</P>
+
+  <P>We gave it up; we were up against Revealed Religion.</P>
+
+  <P>So that night we took a freight train southward to Voi,
+  leaving the babu and his prayer-bell, and his green battle-axe
+  and his conscience alone in the wilderness. We had quite a
+  respect for that babu.</P>
+
+  <P>The district commissioner listened appreciatively to our
+  tale.</P>
+
+  <P>"Of course I shall not carry the matter further," he told us,
+  "but having known the babu, you must see that once he had
+  reported to me I was compelled to order you down here. I am sorry
+  for the inconvenience."</P>
+
+  <P>And when we reflected on the cataclysmic upheaval that babu
+  would have undergone had we not been summoned after breaking one
+  of The Laws in the Book, we had to admit the district
+  commissioner was right.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='PART_VI' id="PART_VI"></A>
+
+  <H2>PART VI.</H2>
+
+  <P>IN MASAILAND.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XXXIII' id="XXXIII"></A>
+
+  <H2>XXXIII.</H2>
+
+  <P>OVER THE LIKIPIA ESCARPMENT.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>Owing to an outbreak of bubonic plague, and consequent
+  quarantine, we had recruited our men outside Nairobi, and had
+  sent them, in charge of C., to a little station up the line.</P>
+
+  <P>Billy and I saw to the loading of our equipment on the train,
+  and at two o'clock, in solitary state, set forth. Our only
+  attendants were Mohammed and Memba Sasa, who had been fumigated
+  and inoculated and generally Red-Crossed for the purpose.</P>
+
+  <P>The little narrow-gauge train doubled and twisted in its climb
+  up the range overlooking Nairobi and the Athi Plains. Fields of
+  corn grew so tall as partially to conceal villages of round,
+  grass-thatched huts with conical roofs; we looked down into deep
+  ravines where grew the broad-leaved bananas; the steep hillsides
+  had all been carefully cultivated. Savages leaning on spears
+  watched us puff heavily by. Women, richly ornamented with copper
+  wire or beads, toiled along bent under loads carried by means of
+  a band across the top of the head.<A name='FNanchor_16_16' id=
+  "FNanchor_16_16"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_16_16'><SUP>[16]</SUP></A> Naked children rushed out
+  to wave at us. We were steaming quite comfortably through Africa
+  as it had been for thousands of years before the white man
+  came.</P>
+
+  <P>At Kikuyu Station we came to a halt. Kikuyu Station ordinarily
+  embarks about two passengers a month, I suppose. Now it was
+  utterly swamped with business, for on it had descended all our
+  safari of thirty-nine men and three mules. Thirty of the
+  thirty-nine yelled and shrieked and got in the wrong place, as
+  usual. C. and the train men and the stationmaster and our
+  responsible boys heaved and tugged and directed, ordered,
+  commanded. At length the human element was loaded to its places
+  and locked in. Then the mules had to be urged up a very narrow
+  gang-lank into a dangerous-looking car. Quite sensibly they
+  declined to take chances. We persuaded them. The process was
+  quite simple. Two of the men holding the ends at a safe distance
+  stretched a light strong cord across the beasts' hind legs, and
+  sawed it back and forth.</P>
+
+  <P>We clanged the doors shut, climbed aboard, and the train at
+  last steamed on. Now bits of forest came across our way, deep,
+  shaded, with trailing curtain vines, and wide leaves as big as
+  table tops, and high, lush, impenetrable undergrowth full of
+  flashing birds, fathomless shadows, and inquisitive monkeys.
+  Occasionally we emerged to the edge of a long oval meadow, set in
+  depressions among hills, like our Sierra meadows. Indeed so like
+  were these openings to those in our own wooded mountains that we
+  always experienced a distinct shock of surprise as the familiar
+  woods parted to disclose a dark solemn savage with flashing
+  spear.</P>
+
+  <P>We stopped at various stations, and descended and walked about
+  in the gathering shadows of the forest. It was getting cool. Many
+  little things attracted our attention, to remain in our memories
+  as isolated pictures. Thus I remember one grave savage squatted
+  by the track playing on a sort of mandoline-shaped instrument. It
+  had two strings, and he twanged these alternately, without the
+  slightest effort to change their pitch by stopping with his
+  fingers. He bent his head sidewise, and listened with the
+  meticulous attention of a connoisseur. We stopped at that place
+  for fully ten minutes, but not for a second did he leave off
+  twanging his two strings, nor did he even momentarily relax his
+  attention.</P>
+
+  <P>It was now near sundown. We had been climbing steadily. The
+  train shrieked twice, and unexpectedly slid out to the edge of
+  the Likipia Escarpment. We looked down once more into the great
+  Rift Valley.</P>
+
+  <P>The Rift Valley is as though a strip of Africa&mdash;extending
+  half the length of the continent&mdash;had in time past sunk
+  bodily some thousands of feet, leaving a more or less sheer
+  escarpment on either side, and preserving intact its own
+  variegated landscape in the bottom. We were on the Likipia
+  Escarpment. We looked across to the Mau Escarpment, where the
+  country over which our train had been travelling continued after
+  its interruption by the valley. And below us were mountains,
+  streams, plains. The westering sun threw strong slants of light
+  down and across.</P>
+
+  <P>The engine shut off its power, and we slid silently down the
+  rather complicated grades and curves of the descent. A noble
+  forest threw its shadows over us. Through the chance openings we
+  caught glimpses of the pale country far below. Across high
+  trestle bridges we rattled, and craned over to see the rushing
+  white water of the mountain torrents a hundred feet down. The
+  shriek of our engine echoed and re-echoed weirdly from the
+  serried trunks of trees and from the great cliffs that seemed to
+  lift themselves as we descended.</P>
+
+  <P>We debarked at Kijabe<A name='FNanchor_17_17' id=
+  "FNanchor_17_17"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_17_17'><SUP>[17]</SUP></A> well after dark. It is
+  situated on a ledge in the escarpment, is perhaps a quarter-mile
+  wide, and includes nothing more elaborate than the station, a row
+  of Indian dukkas, and two houses of South Africans set back
+  towards the rise in the cliffs. A mile or so away, and on a
+  little higher level, stand the extensive buildings of an American
+  mission. It is, I believe, educational as well as sectarian, is
+  situated in one of the most healthful climates of East Africa,
+  and is prosperous.</P>
+
+  <P>At the moment we saw none of these things. We were too busy
+  getting men, mules, and equipment out of the train. Our lanterns
+  flared in the great wind that swept down the defile; and across
+  the track little fires flared too. Shortly we made the
+  acquaintance of the South Africander who furnished us our ox
+  teams and wagon; and of a lank, drawling youth who was to be our
+  "rider." The latter was very anxious to get started, so we piled
+  all our stores and equipment but those immediately necessary for
+  the night aboard the great wagon. Then we returned to the
+  dak-bungalow for a very belated supper. While eating this we
+  discussed our plans.</P>
+
+  <P>These were in essence very simple. Somewhere south of the
+  Great Thirst of the Sotik a river called the Narossara. Back of
+  the river were high mountains, and down the river were benches
+  dropping off by thousands of feet to the barren country of Lake
+  Magahdi. Over some of this country ranged the Greater Kudu,
+  easily the prize buck of East Africa. We intended to try for a
+  Greater Kudu.</P>
+
+  <P>People laughed at us. The beast is extremely rare; it ranges
+  over a wide area; it inhabits the thickest sort of cover in a
+  sheer mountainous country; its senses are wonderfully acute; and
+  it is very wary. A man <I>might</I>, once in a blue moon, get one
+  by happening upon it accidentally, but deliberately to go after
+  it was sheer lunacy. So we were told. As a matter of fact, we
+  thought so ourselves, but Greater Kudu was as good an excuse as
+  another.</P>
+
+  <P>The most immediate of our physical difficulties was the
+  Thirst. Six miles from Kijabe we would leave the Kedong River.
+  After that was no more water for two days and nights. During that
+  time we should be forced to travel and rest in alternation day
+  and night, with a great deal of travel and very little rest. We
+  should be able to carry for the men a limited amount of water on
+  the ox wagon, but the cattle could not drink. It was a hard,
+  anxious grind. A day's journey beyond the first water after the
+  Thirst we should cross the Southern Guaso Nyero River.<A name=
+  'FNanchor_18_18' id="FNanchor_18_18"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_18_18'><SUP>[18]</SUP></A> Then two days should land
+  us at the Narossara. There we must leave our ox wagon and push on
+  with our tiny safari. We planned to relay back for porters from
+  our different camps.</P>
+
+  <P>That was our whole plan. Our transport rider's object in
+  starting this night was to reach the Kedong River, and there to
+  outspan until our arrival next day. The cattle would thus get a
+  good feed and rest. Then at four in the afternoon we would set
+  out to conquer the Thirst. After that it would be a question of
+  travelling to suit the oxen.</P>
+
+  <P>Next morning, when we arose, we found one of the wagon Kikuyus
+  awaiting us. His tale ran that after going four miles, the oxen
+  had been stampeded by lions. In the mix-up the dusselboom had
+  been broken. He demanded a new dusselboom. I looked as wise as
+  though I knew just what that meant; and told him largely, to help
+  himself. Shortly he departed carrying what looked to be the
+  greater part of a forest tree.</P>
+
+  <P>We were in no hurry, so we did not try to get our safari under
+  way before eight o'clock. It consisted of twenty-nine porters,
+  the gunbearers, three personal boys, three syces, and the cook.
+  Of this lot some few stand out from the rest, and deserve
+  particular attention.</P>
+
+  <P>Of course I had my veterans, Memba Sasa and Mohammed. There
+  was also Kongoni, gunbearer, elsewhere described. The third
+  gunbearer was Marrouki, a Wakamba. He was the personal gunbearer
+  of a Mr. Twigg, who very courteously loaned him for this trip as
+  possessing some knowledge of the country. He was a small person,
+  with stripes about his eyes; dressed in a Scotch highland cap,
+  khaki breeches, and a shooting coat miles too big for him. His
+  soul was earnest, his courage great, his training good, his
+  intelligence none too brilliant. Timothy, our cook, was pure
+  Swahili. He was a thin, elderly individual, with a wrinkled brow
+  of care. This represented a conscientious soul. He tried hard to
+  please, but he never could quite forget that he had cooked for
+  the Governor's safari. His air was always one of silent
+  disapproval of our modest outfit. So well did he do, however,
+  often under trying circumstances, that at the close of the
+  expedition Billy presented him with a very fancy knife. To her
+  vast astonishment he burst into violent sobs.</P>
+
+  <P>"Why, what is it?" she asked.</P>
+
+  <P>"Oh, memsahib," he wailed, "I wanted a watch!"</P>
+
+  <P>As personal boy Billy had a Masai named Geyeye.<A name=
+  'FNanchor_19_19' id="FNanchor_19_19"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_19_19'><SUP>[19]</SUP></A> The members of this proud
+  and aristocratic tribe rarely condescend to work for the white
+  man; but when they do, they are very fine servants, for they are
+  highly intelligent. Geyeye was short and very, very ugly. Perhaps
+  this may partly explain his leaving tribal life, for the Masai
+  generally are over six feet.</P>
+
+  <P>C.'s man was an educated Coast Swahili named Abba Ali. This
+  individual was very smart. He wore a neatly-trimmed Vandyke
+  beard, a flannel boating hat, smart tailored khakis, and carried
+  a rattan cane. He was alert, quick, and intelligent. His position
+  was midway between that of personal boy and headman.</P>
+
+  <P>Of the rank and file we began with twenty-nine. Two changed
+  their minds before we were fairly started, and departed in the
+  night. There was no time to get regular porters; but fortunately
+  a Kikuyu chief detailed two wild savages from his tribe to act as
+  carriers. These two children of nature drifted in with pleasant
+  smiles and little else save knick-knacks. From our supplies we
+  gave them two thin jerseys, reaching nearly to the knees. Next
+  day they appeared with broad tucks sewed around the middle! They
+  looked like "My Mama didn't use wool soap." We then gave it up,
+  and left them free and untrammelled.</P>
+
+  <P>They differed radically. One was past the first enthusiasms
+  and vanities of youth. He was small, unobtrusive, unornamented.
+  He had no possessions save the jersey, the water-bottle, and the
+  blanket we ourselves supplied. The blanket he crossed bandolier
+  fashion on one shoulder. It hung down behind like a tasselled
+  sash. His face was little and wizened and old. He was quiet and
+  uncomplaining, and the "easy mark" for all the rest. We had
+  constantly to be interfering to save him from imposition as to
+  too heavy loads, too many jobs, and the like. Nearing the close
+  of the long expedition, when our loads were lighter and fewer,
+  one day C. spoke up.</P>
+
+  <P>"I'm going to give the old man a good time," said he. "I doubt
+  if he's ever had one before, or if he ever will again. He's that
+  sort of a meek damnfool."</P>
+
+  <P>So it was decreed that Kimau<A name='FNanchor_20_20' id=
+  "FNanchor_20_20"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_20_20'><SUP>[20]</SUP></A> should carry nothing for
+  the rest of the trip, was to do no more work, was to have all he
+  wanted to eat. It was a treat to see him. He accepted these
+  things without surprise, without spoken thanks; just as he would
+  have accepted an increased supply of work and kicks. Before his
+  little fire he squatted all day, gazing vacantly off into space,
+  or gnawing on a piece of the meat he always kept roasting on
+  sticks. He spoke to no one; he never smiled or displayed any
+  obvious signs of enjoyment; but from him radiated a feeling of
+  deep content.</P>
+
+  <P>His companion savage was a young blood, and still affected by
+  the vanities of life. His hair he wore in short tight curls,
+  resembling the rope hair of a French poodle, liberally anointed
+  with castor-oil and coloured with red-paint clay. His body, too,
+  was turned to bronze by the same method, so that he looked like a
+  beautiful smooth metal statue come to life. To set this quality
+  off he wore glittering collars, bracelets, and ear ornaments of
+  polished copper and brass. When he joined us his sole costume was
+  a negligent two-foot strip of cotton cloth. After he had received
+  his official jersey, he carefully tied the cloth over his
+  wonderful head; nor as far as we knew did he again remove it
+  until the end of the expedition. All his movements were
+  inexpressibly graceful. They reminded one somehow of Flaxman's
+  drawings of the Greek gods. His face, too, was good-natured and
+  likeable. A certain half feminine, wild grace, combined with the
+  queer effect of his headgear, caused us to name him Daphne. At
+  home he was called Kingangui. At first he carried his burden
+  after the fashion of savages&mdash;on the back; and kept to the
+  rear of the procession; and at evening consorted only with old
+  Lightfoot. As soon as opportunity offered, he built himself a
+  marvellous iridescent ball of marabout feathers. Each of these he
+  split along the quill, so that they curled and writhed in the
+  wind. This picturesque charm he suspended from a short pole in
+  front of his tent. Also, he belonged to the Kikuyu tribe; he ate
+  no game meat, but confined his diet to cornmeal porridge. We were
+  much interested in watching Daphne's gradual conversion from
+  savage ways to those of the regular porter. Within two weeks he
+  was carrying his load on his head or shoulder, and trying to keep
+  up near the head of the safari. The charm of feathers disappeared
+  shortly after, I am sorry to say. He took his share of the meat.
+  Within two months Daphne was imitating as closely as possible the
+  manners and customs of his safari mates. But he never really
+  succeeded in looking anything but the wild and graceful savage he
+  was.</P>
+
+  <P>FOOTNOTES:</P><A name='Footnote_16_16' id=
+  "Footnote_16_16"></A><A href='#FNanchor_16_16'>[16]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>After the fashion of the Canadian tump line.</P>
+  </DIV><A name='Footnote_17_17' id="Footnote_17_17"></A><A href=
+  '#FNanchor_17_17'>[17]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>Pronounce all the syllables.</P>
+  </DIV><A name='Footnote_18_18' id="Footnote_18_18"></A><A href=
+  '#FNanchor_18_18'>[18]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>An entirely different stream from that flowing north of Mt.
+    Kenia.</P>
+  </DIV><A name='Footnote_19_19' id="Footnote_19_19"></A><A href=
+  '#FNanchor_19_19'>[19]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>Pronounce <I>every</I> syllable.</P>
+  </DIV><A name='Footnote_20_20' id="Footnote_20_20"></A><A href=
+  '#FNanchor_20_20'>[20]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>His official name was Lightfoot, Queen of the Fairies,
+    because of his ballet-like costume.</P>
+  </DIV>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XXXIV' id="XXXIV"></A>
+
+  <H2>XXXIV.</H2>
+
+  <P>TO THE KEDONG.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>For four hours we descended the valley through high thorn
+  scrub or the occasional grassy openings. We were now in the floor
+  of the Rift Valley, and both along the escarpments and in the
+  floor of the great blue valley itself mountains were all about
+  us. Most of the large ones were evidently craters; and everywhere
+  were smaller kopjes or buttes, that in their day had also served
+  as blow holes for subterranean fires.</P>
+
+  <P>At the end of this time we arrived at the place where we were
+  supposed to find the wagon. No wagon was there.</P>
+
+  <P>The spot was in the middle of a level plain on which grew very
+  scattered bushes, a great deal like the sparser mesquite growths
+  of Arizona. Towards the Likipia Escarpment, and about half-way to
+  its base, a line of trees marked the course of the Kedong River.
+  Beyond that, fairly against the mountain, we made out a settler's
+  house.</P>
+
+  <P>Leaving Billy and the safari, C. and I set out for this house.
+  The distance was long, and we had not made half of it before
+  thunder clouds began to gather. They came up thick and black
+  behind the escarpment, and rapidly spread over the entire
+  heavens. We found the wagon shortly, still mending its
+  dusselboom, or whatever the thing was. Leaving instructions for
+  it to proceed to a certain point on the Kedong River, we started
+  back for our safari.</P>
+
+  <P>It rained. In ten minutes the dusty plains, as far as the eye
+  could reach, were covered with water two or three inches deep,
+  from which the sparse bunches of grasses grew like reeds in a
+  great marshy lake. We splashed along with the water over our
+  ankles. The channels made by the game trails offered natural
+  conduits, and wherever there was the least grade they had become
+  rushing brooks. We found the safari very bedraggled. Billy had
+  made a mound of valuables, atop which she perched, her waterproof
+  cape spread as wide as possible, a good deal like a brooding hen.
+  We set out for the meeting-point on the Kedong. In half an hour
+  we had there found a bit of higher ground and had made camp.</P>
+
+  <P>As suddenly as they had gathered the storm clouds broke away.
+  The expiring sun sent across the valley a flood of golden light,
+  that gilded the rugged old mountain of Suswa over the way.</P>
+
+  <P>"Directly on the other side of Suswa," C. told me, "there is a
+  'pan' of hard clay. This rain will fill it, and we shall find
+  water there. We can take a night's rest, and set off comfortably
+  in the morning."</P>
+
+  <P>So the rain that had soaked us so thoroughly was a blessing
+  after all. While we were cooking supper the wagon passed us, its
+  wheels and frame creaking, its great whip cracking like a rifle,
+  its men shrieking at the imperturbable team of eighteen oxen. It
+  would travel until the oxen wanted to graze, or sleep, or scratch
+  an ear, or meditate on why is a Kikuyu. Thereupon they would be
+  outspanned and allowed to do it, whatever it was, until they were
+  ready to go on again. Then they would go on. These sequences
+  might take place at any time of the day or night, and for greater
+  or lesser intervals of time. That was distinctly up to the oxen;
+  the human beings had mighty little to say in the matter. But
+  transport riding, from the point of view of the rank outsider,
+  really deserves a chapter of its own.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XXXV' id="XXXV"></A>
+
+  <H2>XXXV.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE TRANSPORT RIDER.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>The wagon is one evolved in South Africa&mdash;a long,
+  heavily-constructed affair, with ingenious braces and timbers so
+  arranged as to furnish the maximum clearance with the greatest
+  facility for substitution in case the necessity for repairs might
+  arise. The whole vehicle can be dismounted and reassembled in a
+  few hours; so that unfordable streams or impossible bits of
+  country can be crossed piecemeal. Its enormous wheels are set
+  wide apart. The brake is worked by a crank at the rear, like a
+  reversal of the starting mechanism of a motor car. Bolted to the
+  frame on either side between the front and rear wheels are
+  capacious cupboards, and two stout water kegs swing to and fro
+  when the craft is under way. The net carrying capacity of such a
+  wagon is from three to four thousand pounds.</P>
+
+  <P>This formidable vehicle, in our own case, was drawn by a team
+  of eighteen oxen. The biggest brutes, the wheelers, were attached
+  to a tongue, all the others pulled on a long chain. The only
+  harness was the pronged yoke that fitted just forward of the
+  hump. Over rough country the wheelers were banged and jerked
+  about savagely by the tongue; they did not seem to mind it but
+  exhibited a certain amount of intelligence in manipulation.</P>
+
+  <P>To drive these oxen we had one white man named Brown, and two
+  small Kikuyu savages. One of these worked the brake crank in the
+  rear while the other preceded the lead cattle. Brown exercised
+  general supervision, a long-lashed whip and Boer-Dutch expletives
+  and admonitions.</P>
+
+  <P>In transport riding, as this game is called, there is required
+  a great amount of especial skill though not necessarily a high
+  degree of intelligence. Along the flats all goes well enough, but
+  once in the unbelievable rough country of a hill trek the
+  situation alters. A man must know cattle and their symptoms. It
+  is no light feat to wake up eighteen sluggish bovine minds to the
+  necessity for effort, and then to throw so much dynamic energy
+  into the situation that the whole eighteen will begin to pull at
+  once. That is the secret, unanimity; an ox is the most easily
+  discouraged working animal on earth. If the first three couples
+  begin to haul before the others have aroused to their effort,
+  they will not succeed in budging the wagon an inch, but after a
+  moment's struggle will give up completely. By that time the
+  leaders respond to the command and throw themselves forward in
+  the yoke. In vain. They cannot pull the wagon and their wheel
+  comrades too. Therefore they give up. By this time, perhaps, the
+  lash has aroused the first lot to another effort. And so they go,
+  pulling and hauling against each other, getting nowhere, until
+  the end is an exhausted team, a driver half insane, and a great
+  necessity for unloading.</P>
+
+  <P>A good driver, on the other hand, shrieks a few premonitory
+  Dutch words&mdash;and then! I suppose inside those bovine heads
+  the effect is somewhat that of a violent electric explosion. At
+  any rate it hits them all at once, and all together, in response,
+  they surge against their yokes. The heavily laden wagon creaks,
+  groans, moves forward. The hurricane of Dutch and the volleys of
+  whip crackings rise to a crescendo. We are off!</P>
+
+  <P>To perform just this little simple trick of getting the thing
+  started requires not only a peculiar skill or gift, but also
+  lungs of brass and a throat of iron. A transport rider without a
+  voice is as a tenor in the same fix. He may&mdash;and
+  does&mdash;get so hoarse that it is a pain to hear him; but as
+  long as he can croak in good volume he is all right. Mere
+  shouting will not do. He must shriek, until to the sympathetic
+  bystander it seems that his throat must split wide open.
+  Furthermore, he must shriek the proper things. It all sounds
+  alike to every one but transport riders and oxen; but as a matter
+  of fact it is Boer-Dutch, nicely assorted to suit different
+  occasions. It is incredible that oxen should distinguish; but,
+  then, it is also incredible that trout should distinguish the
+  nice differences in artificial flies.</P>
+
+  <P>After the start has been made successfully, the craft must be
+  kept under way. To an unbiassed bystander the whole affair looks
+  insane. The wagon creaks and sways and groans and cries aloud as
+  it bumps over great boulders in the way; the leading Kikuyu
+  dances nimbly and shrills remarks at the nearest cattle; the tail
+  Kikuyu winds energetically back and forth on his little handle,
+  and tries to keep his feet. And Brown! he is magnificent! His
+  long lash sends out a volley of rifle reports, down, up, ahead,
+  back; his cracked voice roars out an unending stream of apparent
+  gibberish. Back and forth along the line of the team he skips
+  nimbly, the sweat streaming from his face. And the oxen plod
+  along, unhasting, unexcited, their eyes dreamy, chewing the cud
+  of yesterday's philosophic reflections. The situation conveys the
+  general impression of a peevish little stream breaking against
+  great calm cliffs. All this frantic excitement and expenditure of
+  energy is so apparently purposeless and futile, the calm cattle
+  seem so aloof and superior to it all, so absolutely unaffected by
+  it. They are going slowly, to be sure; their gait may be
+  maddeningly deliberate, but evidently they do not intend to be
+  hurried. Why not let them take their own speed?</P>
+
+  <P>But all this hullabaloo means something after all. It does its
+  business, and the top of the boulder-strewn hill is gained.
+  Without it the whole concern would have stopped, and then the
+  wagon would have to be unloaded before a fresh start could have
+  been made. Results with cattle are not shown by facial expression
+  nor by increased speed, but simply by continuance. They will plod
+  up steep hills or along the level at the same placid gait. Only
+  in the former case they require especial treatment.</P>
+
+  <P>In case the wagon gets stuck on a hill, as will occasionally
+  happen, so that all the oxen are discouraged at once, we would
+  see one of the Kikuyus leading the team back and forth, back and
+  forth, on the side hill just ahead of the wagon. This is to
+  confuse their minds, cause them to forget their failure, and thus
+  to make another attempt.</P>
+
+  <P>At one stretch we had three days of real mountains.
+  N'gombe<A name='FNanchor_21_21' id="FNanchor_21_21"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_21_21'><SUP>[21]</SUP></A> Brown shrieked like a steam
+  calliope all the way through. He lasted the distance, but had
+  little camp-fire conversation even with his beloved Kikuyus.</P>
+
+  <P>When the team is outspanned, which in the waterless country of
+  forced marches is likely to be almost any time of the day or
+  night, N'gombe Brown sought a little rest. For this purpose he
+  had a sort of bunk that let down underneath the wagon. If it were
+  daytime, the cattle were allowed to graze under supervision of
+  one of the Kikuyus. If it was night time they were tethered to
+  the long chain, where they lay in a somnolent double row. A
+  lantern at the head of the file and one at the wagon's tail were
+  supposed to discourage lions. In a bad lion country fires were
+  added to these defences.</P>
+
+  <P>N'gombe Brown thus worked hard through varied and long hours
+  in strict intimacy with stupid and exasperating beasts. After
+  working hours he liked to wander out to watch those same beasts
+  grazing! His mind was as full of cattle as that! Although we
+  offered him reading matter, he never seemed to care for it, nor
+  for long-continued conversation with white people not of his
+  trade. In fact the only gleam of interest I could get out of him
+  was by commenting on the qualities or peculiarities of the oxen.
+  He had a small mouth-organ on which he occasionally performed,
+  and would hold forth for hours with his childlike Kikuyus. In the
+  intelligence to follow ordinary directions he was an infant. We
+  had to iterate and reiterate in words of one syllable our
+  directions as to routes and meeting-points, and then he was quite
+  as apt to go wrong as right. Yet, I must repeat, he knew
+  thoroughly all the ins and outs of a very difficult trade, and
+  understood, as well, how to keep his cattle always fit and in
+  good condition. In fact he was a little hipped on what the "dear
+  n'gombes" should or should not be called upon to do.</P>
+
+  <P>One incident will illustrate all this better than I could
+  explain it. When we reached the Narossara River we left the wagon
+  and pushed on afoot. We were to be gone an indefinite time, and
+  we left N'gombe Brown and his outfit very well fixed. Along the
+  Narossara ran a pleasant shady strip of high jungle; the country
+  about was clear and open; but most important of all, a white man
+  of education and personal charm occupied a trading boma, or
+  enclosure, near at hand. An accident changed our plans and
+  brought us back unexpectedly at the end of a few weeks. We found
+  that N'gombe Brown had trekked back a long day's journey, and was
+  encamped alone at the end of a spur of mountains. We sent native
+  runners after him. He explained his change of base by saying that
+  the cattle feed was a little better at his new camp! Mind you
+  this: at the Narossara the feed was quite good enough, the oxen
+  were doing no work, there was companionship, books, papers, and
+  even a phonograph to while away the long weeks until our return.
+  N'gombe Brown quite cheerfully deserted all this to live in
+  solitude where he imagined the feed to be microscopically
+  better!</P>
+
+  <P>FOOTNOTES:</P><A name='Footnote_21_21' id=
+  "Footnote_21_21"></A><A href='#FNanchor_21_21'>[21]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>N'gombe = oxen.</P>
+  </DIV>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XXXVI' id="XXXVI"></A>
+
+  <H2>XXXVI.</H2>
+
+  <P>ACROSS THE THIRST.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>We were off, a bright, clear day after the rains. Suswa hung
+  grayish pink against the bluest of skies. Our way slanted across
+  the Rift Valley to her base, turned the corner, and continued on
+  the other side of the great peak until we had reached the
+  rainwater "pan" on her farther side. It was a long march.</P>
+
+  <P>The plains were very wide and roomy. Here and there on them
+  rose many small cones and craters, lava flows and other varied
+  evidences of recent volcanic activity. Geologically recent, I
+  mean. The grasses of the flowing plains were very brown, and the
+  molehill craters very dark; the larger craters blasted and
+  austere; the higher escarpment in the background blue with a
+  solemn distance. The sizes of things were not originally fitted
+  out for little tiny people like human beings. We walked hours to
+  reach landmarks apparently only a few miles away.</P>
+
+  <P>In this manner we crept along industriously until noon, by
+  which time we had nearly reached the shoulder of Suswa, around
+  which we had to double. The sun was strong, and the men not yet
+  hardened to the work. We had many stragglers. After lunch Memba
+  Sasa and I strolled along on a route flanking that of the safari,
+  looking for the first of our meat supply. Within a short time I
+  had killed a Thompson's gazelle. Some solemn giraffes looked on
+  at the performance, and then moved off like mechanical toys.</P>
+
+  <P>The day lengthened. We were in the midst of wonderful scenery.
+  Our objection grew to be that it took so long to put any of it
+  behind us. Insensibly, however, we made progress. Suddenly, as it
+  seemed, we found ourselves looking at the other side of Suswa,
+  and various brand-new little craters had moved up to take the
+  places of our old friends. At last, about half-past four, we
+  topped the swell of one of the numerous and interminable land
+  billows that undulate across all plains countries here, and saw a
+  few miles away the wagon outspanned. We reached it about sunset,
+  to be greeted by the welcome news that there was indeed water in
+  the pan.</P>
+
+  <P>We unsaddled just before dark, and I immediately started
+  towards the game herds, many of which were grazing a half-mile
+  away. The gazelle would supply our own larder, but meat for
+  hard-worked man was very desirable. I shot a hartebeeste, made
+  the prearranged signal for men to carry meat, and returned to
+  camp.</P>
+
+  <P>Even yet the men were not all in. We took lanterns and
+  returned along the road, for the long marches under a desert sun
+  are no joke. At last we had accounted for all but two. These we
+  had to abandon. Next day we found their loads, but never laid
+  eyes on them again. Thus early our twenty-nine became
+  twenty-seven.</P>
+
+  <P>About nine o'clock, just as we were turning, a number of lions
+  began to roar. Usually a lion roars once or twice by way of
+  satisfaction after leaving a kill. These, however, were engaged
+  in driving game, and hence trying to make as much noise as
+  possible. We distinguished plainly seven individuals, perhaps
+  more. The air trembled with the sound as to the deepest tones of
+  a big organ, only the organ is near and enclosed, while these
+  vibrations were in the open air and remote. For a few moments the
+  great salvos would boom across the veld, roll after roll of
+  thunder; then would ensue a momentary dead silence; then a single
+  voice would open, to be joined immediately by the others.</P>
+
+  <P>We awoke next day to an unexpected cold drizzle. This was a
+  bit uncomfortable, from one point of view, and most unusual, but
+  it robbed the thirst of its terrors. We were enabled to proceed
+  leisurely, and to get a good sleep near water every night. The
+  wagon had, as usual, pulled out some time during the night.</P>
+
+  <P>Our way led over a succession of low rolling ridges each
+  higher than its predecessor. Game herds fed in the shallow
+  valleys between. At about ten o'clock we came to the foot of the
+  Mau Escarpment, and also to the unexpected sight of the wagon
+  outspanned. N'gombe Brown explained to us that the oxen had
+  refused to proceed farther in face of a number of lions that came
+  around to sniff at them. Then the rain had come on, and he had
+  been unwilling to attempt the Mau while the footing was slippery.
+  This sounded reasonable; in fact, it was still reasonable. The
+  grass was here fairly neck high, and we found a rain-filled
+  water-hole. Therefore we decided to make camp. C. and I wandered
+  out in search of game. We tramped a great deal of bold, rugged
+  country, both in ca&ntilde;on bottoms and along the open ridges,
+  but found only a rhinoceros, one bush-buck and a dozen
+  hartebeeste. African game, as a general rule, avoids a country
+  where the grass grows very high. We enjoyed, however, some bold
+  and wonderful mountain scenery, and obtained glimpses through the
+  flying murk of the vast plains and the base of Suswa. On a
+  precipitous ca&ntilde;on cliff we found a hanging garden of
+  cactus and of looped cactus-like vines that was a marvel to
+  behold. We ran across the hartebeeste on our way home. Our men
+  were already out of meat; the hartebeeste of yesterday had
+  disappeared. These porters are a good deal like the old-fashioned
+  Michigan lumberjacks&mdash;they take a good deal of feeding for
+  the first few days. When we came upon the little herd in the
+  neck-high grass, I took a shot. At the report the animal went
+  down flat. We wandered over slowly. Memba Sasa whetted his knife
+  and walked up. Thereupon Mr. Hartebeeste jumped to his feet,
+  flirted his tail gaily, and departed. We followed him a mile or
+  so, but he got stronger and gayer every moment, until at last he
+  frisked out of the landscape quite strong and hearty. In all my
+  African experience I lost only six animals hit by bullets, as I
+  took infinite pains and any amount of time to hunt down wounded
+  beasts. This animal was, I think, "creased" by too high a shot.
+  Certainly he was not much injured; but certainly he got a big
+  shock to start with.</P>
+
+  <P>The little herd had gone on. I got down and crawled on hands
+  and knees in the thick grass. It was slow work, and I had to
+  travel by landmarks. When I finally reckoned I had about reached
+  the proper place, I stood up suddenly, my rifle at ready. So
+  dense was the cover and so still the air that I had actually
+  crawled right into the middle of the band! While we were cutting
+  up the meat the sun broke through strongly.</P>
+
+  <P>Therefore the wagon started on up the Mau at six o'clock.
+  Twelve hours later we followed. The fine drizzle had set in
+  again. We were very glad the wagon had taken advantage of the
+  brief dry time.</P>
+
+  <P>From the top of the sheer rise we looked back for the last
+  time over the wonderful panorama of the Rift Valley. Before us
+  were wide rounded hills covered with a scattered small growth
+  that in general appearance resembled scrub oak. It sloped away
+  gently until it was lost in mists. Later, when these cleared, we
+  saw distant blue mountains across a tremendous shallow basin. We
+  were nearly on a level with the summit of Suswa itself, nor did
+  we again drop much below that altitude. After five or six miles
+  we overtook the wagon outspanned. The projected all-night journey
+  had again been frustrated by the lions. These beasts had proved
+  so bold and menacing that finally the team had been forced to
+  stop in sheer self-defence. However, the day was cool and
+  overcast, so nothing was lost.</P>
+
+  <P>After topping the Mau we saw a few gazelle, zebra, and
+  hartebeeste, but soon plunged into a bush country quite destitute
+  of game. We were paralleling the highest ridge of the escarpment,
+  and so alternated between the crossing of ca&ntilde;ons and the
+  travelling along broad ridges between them. In lack of other
+  amusement for a long time I rode with the wagon. The country was
+  very rough and rocky. Everybody was excited to the point of
+  frenzy, except the wagon. It had a certain Dutch stolidity in its
+  manner of calmly and bumpily surmounting such portions of the
+  landscape as happened in its way.</P>
+
+  <P>After a very long, tiresome march we camped above a little
+  stream. Barring our lucky rain this would have been the first
+  water since leaving the Kedong River. Here were hundreds of big
+  blue pigeons swooping in to their evening drink.</P>
+
+  <P>For two days more we repeated this sort of travel, but always
+  with good camps at fair-sized streams. Gradually we slanted away
+  from the main ridge, though we still continued cross-cutting the
+  swells and ravines thrown off its flanks. Only the ravines hour
+  by hour became shallower, and the swells lower and broader. On
+  their tops the scrub sometimes gave way to openings of short
+  grass. On these fed a few gazelle of both sorts, and an
+  occasional zebra or so. We saw also four topi, a beast about the
+  size of our wapiti, built on the general specifications of a
+  hartebeeste, but with the most beautiful iridescent plum-coloured
+  coat. This quartette was very wild. I made three separate stalks
+  on them, but the best I could do was 360 paces, at which range I
+  missed.</P>
+
+  <P>Finally we surmounted the last low swell to look down a wide
+  and sloping plain to the depression in which flowed the principal
+  river of these parts, the Southern Guaso Nyero. Beyond it
+  stretched the immense oceanlike plains of the Loieta, from which
+  here and there rose isolated hills, very distant, like lonesome
+  ships at sea. A little to the left, also very distant, we could
+  make out an unbroken blue range of mountains. These were our
+  ultimate destination.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XXXVII' id="XXXVII"></A>
+
+  <H2>XXXVII.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE SOUTHERN GUASO NYERO.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>The Southern Guaso Nyero, unlike its northern namesake, is a
+  sluggish, muddy stream, rather small, flowing between abrupt clay
+  banks. Farther down it drops into great ca&ntilde;ons and eroded
+  abysses, and acquires a certain grandeur. But here, at the ford
+  of Agate's Drift, it is decidedly unimpressive. Scant greenery
+  ornaments its banks. In fact, at most places they run hard and
+  baked to a sheer drop-off of ten or fifteen feet. Scattered
+  mimosa trees and aloes mark its course. The earth for a mile or
+  so is trampled by thousands of Masai cattle that at certain
+  seasons pass through the funnel of this, the only ford for miles.
+  Apparently insignificant, it is given to sudden, tremendous
+  rises. These originate in the rainfalls of the upper Mau
+  Escarpment, many miles away. It behooves the safari to cross
+  promptly if it can, and to camp always on the farther bank.</P>
+
+  <P>This we did, pitching our tents in a little opening, between
+  clumps of pretty flowering aloes and the mimosas. Here, as
+  everywhere in this country, until we had passed the barrier of
+  the Narossara mountains, the common horseflies were a plague.
+  They follow the Masai cattle. I can give you no better idea of
+  their numbers than to tell you two isolated facts: I killed
+  twenty-one at one blow; and in the morning, before sunrise, the
+  apex of our tent held a solid black mass of the creatures running
+  the length of the ridge pole, and from half an inch to two inches
+  deep! Every pack was black with them on the march, and the wagon
+  carried its millions. When the shadow of a branch would cross
+  that slowly lumbering vehicle, the swarm would rise and bumble
+  around distractedly for a moment before settling down again. They
+  fairly made a nimbus of darkness.</P>
+
+  <P>After we had made camp we saw a number of Masai warriors
+  hovering about the opposite bank, but they did not venture
+  across. Some of their women did, however, and came cheerily into
+  camp. These most interesting people are worth more than a casual
+  word, so I shall reserve my observations on them until a later
+  chapter. One of our porters, a big Baganda named Sabakaki, was
+  suffering severely from pains in the chest that subsequently
+  developed into pleurisy. From the Masai women we tried to buy
+  some of the milk they carried in gourds; at first they seemed not
+  averse, but as soon as they realized the milk was not for our own
+  consumption, they turned their backs on poor Sabakaki and refused
+  to have anything more to do with us.</P>
+
+  <P>These Masai are very difficult to trade with. Their only
+  willing barter is done in sheep. These they seem to consider
+  legitimate objects of commerce. A short distance from our camp
+  stood three whitewashed round houses with thatched, conical
+  roofs, the property of a trader named Agate. He was away at the
+  time of our visit.</P>
+
+  <P>After an early morning, but vain, attempt to get Billy a shot
+  at a lion<A name='FNanchor_22_22' id=
+  "FNanchor_22_22"></A><A href='#Footnote_22_22'><SUP>[22]</SUP></A>
+  we set out for our distant blue mountains. The day was a journey
+  over plains of great variegation. At times they were covered with
+  thin scrub; at others with small groves; or again, they were open
+  and grassy. Always they undulated gently, so from their tops one
+  never saw as far as he thought he was going to see. As landmark
+  we steered by a good-sized butte named Donga Rasha.</P>
+
+  <P>Memba Sasa and I marched ahead on foot. In this thin scrub we
+  got glimpses of many beasts. At one time we were within fifty
+  yards of a band of magnificent eland. By fleeting glimpses we saw
+  also many wildebeeste and zebra, with occasionally one of the
+  smaller grass antelope. Finally, in an open glade we caught sight
+  of something tawny showing in the middle of a bush. It was too
+  high off the ground to be a buck. We sneaked nearer. At fifty
+  yards we came to a halt, still puzzled. Judging by its height and
+  colour, it should be a lion, but try as we would we could not
+  make out what part of his anatomy was thus visible. At last I
+  made up my mind to give him a shot from the Springfield, with the
+  &middot;405 handy. At the shot the tawny patch heaved and lay
+  still. We manoeuvred cautiously, and found we had killed stone
+  dead not a lion, but a Bohur reed-buck lying atop an ant hill
+  concealed in the middle of the bush. This accounted for its
+  height above the ground. As it happened, I very much wanted one
+  of these animals as a specimen, so everybody was satisfied.</P>
+
+  <P>Shortly after, attracted by a great concourse of carrion
+  birds, both on trees and in the air, we penetrated a thicket to
+  come upon a full-grown giraffe killed by lions. The claw marks
+  and other indications were indubitable. The carcass had been
+  partly eaten, but was rapidly vanishing under the attacks of the
+  birds.</P>
+
+  <P>Just before noon we passed Donga Rasha and emerged on the open
+  plains. Here I caught sight of some Roberts' gazelle, a new
+  species to me, and started alone in pursuit. They, as usual,
+  trotted over the nearest rise, so with due precautions I followed
+  after. At the top of that rise I lay still in astonishment.
+  Before me marched solemnly an unbroken single file of game,
+  reaching literally to my limit of vision in both directions. They
+  came over the land swell a mile to my left, and they were
+  disappearing over another land swell a mile and a half to my
+  right. It was rigidly single file, except for the young; the nose
+  of one beast fairly touching the tail of the one ahead, and it
+  plodded along at a businesslike walk. There were but three
+  species represented&mdash;the gnu, the zebra, and the
+  hartebeeste. I did not see the head of the procession, for it had
+  gone from sight before I arrived; nor did I ever see the tail of
+  it either, for the safari appearing inopportunely broke its
+  continuance. But I saw two miles and a half, solid, of big game.
+  It was a great and formal trek, probably to new pastures.</P>
+
+  <P>Then I turned my attention to the Roberts' gazelle, and my
+  good luck downed a specimen at 273 yards. This, with the Bohur
+  reed-buck, made the second new species for the day. Our luck was
+  not yet over, however. We had proceeded but a few miles when
+  Kongoni discovered a herd of topi. The safari immediately lay
+  down, while I went ahead. There was little cover, and I had a
+  very hard time to get within range, especially as a dozen zebras
+  kept grazing across the line of my stalks. The topi themselves
+  were very uneasy, crossing and recrossing and looking doubtfully
+  in my direction. I had a number of chances at small bucks, but
+  refused them in my desire to get a shot at the big leader of the
+  herd. Finally he separated from the rest and faced in my
+  direction at just 268 yards. At the shot he fell dead.</P>
+
+  <P>For the first time we had an opportunity to admire the
+  wonderful pelt. It is beautiful in quality, plum colour, with
+  iridescent lights and wavy "water marks" changing to pearl colour
+  on the four quarters, with black legs. We were both struck with
+  the gorgeousness of a topi motor-rug made of three skins, with
+  these pearl spots as accents in the corners. To our ambitions and
+  hopes we added more topi.</P>
+
+  <P>Our journey to the Narossara River lasted three days in all.
+  We gained an outlying spur of the blue mountains, and skirted
+  their base. The usual varied foothill country led us through
+  defiles, over ridges, and by charming groves. We began to see
+  Masai cattle in great herds. The gentle humpbacked beasts were
+  held in close formation by herders afoot, tall, lithe young
+  savages with spears. In the distance and through the heat haze
+  the beasts shimmered strangely, their glossy reds and whites and
+  blacks blending together. In this country of wide expanses and
+  clear air we could thus often make out a very far-off herd simply
+  as a speck of rich colour against the boundless rolling
+  plains.</P>
+
+  <P>Here we saw a good variety of game. Zebras, of course, and
+  hartebeeste; the Roberts' gazelle, a few topi, a good many of the
+  gnu or wildebeeste discovered and named by Roosevelt; a few
+  giraffes, klipspringer on the rocky buttes, cheetah, and the
+  usual jackals, hyenas, etc. I killed one very old zebra. So
+  ancient was he that his teeth had worn down to the level of the
+  gums, which seemed fairly on the point of closing over.
+  Nevertheless he was still fat and sleek. He could not much longer
+  have continued to crop the grass. Such extreme age in wild
+  animals is, in Africa at least, most remarkable, for generally
+  they meet violent deaths while still in their prime.</P>
+
+  <P>About three o'clock of the third afternoon we came in sight of
+  a long line of forest trees running down parallel with the
+  nearest mountain ranges. These marked the course of the
+  Narossara, and by four o'clock we were descending the last
+  slope.</P>
+
+  <P>FOOTNOTES:</P><A name='Footnote_22_22' id=
+  "Footnote_22_22"></A><A href='#FNanchor_22_22'>[22]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>See "The Land of Footprints."</P>
+  </DIV>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XXXVIII' id="XXXVIII"></A>
+
+  <H2>XXXVIII.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE LOWER BENCHES.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>The Narossara is really only about creek size, but as it flows
+  the whole year round it merits the title of river. It rises in
+  the junction of a long spur with the main ranges, cuts straight
+  across a wide inward bend of the mountains, joins them again,
+  plunges down a deep and tremendous ca&ntilde;on to the level of a
+  second bench below great cliffs, meanders peacefully in flowery
+  meadows and delightful glades for some miles, and then once more,
+  and most unexpectedly, drops eighteen hundred feet by waterfall
+  and precipitous cascade to join the Southern Guaso Nyero. The
+  country around this junction is some of the roughest I saw in
+  Africa.</P>
+
+  <P>We camped at the spot where the river ran at about its maximum
+  distance from the mountains. Our tents were pitched beneath the
+  shade of tall and refreshing trees.</P>
+
+  <P>A number of Masai women visited us, laughing and joking with
+  Billy in their quizzically humorous fashion. Just as we were
+  sitting down at table an Englishman wandered out of the greenery
+  and approached. He was a small man with a tremendous red beard,
+  wore loose garments and tennis shoes, and strolled up, his hands
+  in his pockets and smoking a cigarette. This was V., a man of
+  whom we had heard. A member of a historical family, officer in a
+  crack English regiment, he had resigned everything to come into
+  this wild country. Here he had built a boma, or enclosed
+  compound, and engaged himself in acquiring Masai sheep in
+  exchange for beads, wire, and cloth. Obviously the profits of
+  such transactions could not be the temptation. He liked the life,
+  and he liked his position of influence with these proud and
+  savage people. Strangely enough, he cared little for the sporting
+  possibilities of the country, though of course he did a little
+  occasional shooting; but was quite content with his trading, his
+  growing knowledge of and intimacy with the Masai, and his
+  occasional tremendous journeys. To the casual and infrequent
+  stranger his attitude was reported most uncertain.</P>
+
+  <P>We invited him to tea, which he accepted, and we fell into
+  conversation. He and C. were already old acquaintances. The man,
+  I found, was shy about talking of the things that interested him;
+  but as they most decidedly interested us also we managed to
+  convey an impression of our sincerity. Thereafter he was most
+  friendly. His helpfulness, kindness, and courtesy could not have
+  been bettered. He lent us his own boy as guide down through the
+  ca&ntilde;ons of the Narossara to the Lower Benches, where we
+  hoped to find kudu; he offered store-room to such of our supplies
+  as we intended holding in reserve; he sent us sheep and eggs as a
+  welcome variety to our game diet; and in addition he gave us
+  Masai implements and ornaments we could not possibly have
+  acquired in any other way. It is impossible to buy the personal
+  belongings of this proud and independent people at any price. The
+  price of a spear ordinarily runs about two rupees' worth, when
+  one trades with any other tribe. I know of a case where a Masai
+  was offered fifty rupees for his weapon, but refused scornfully.
+  V. acquired these things through friendship; and after we had
+  gained his, he was most generous with them. Thus he presented us
+  with a thing almost impossible to get and seen rarely outside of
+  museums&mdash;the Masai war bonnet, made of the mane of a lion.
+  It is in shape and appearance, though not in colour, almost
+  exactly like the grenadier's shako of the last century. In
+  addition to this priceless trophy, V. also gave us samples of the
+  cattle bells, both wooden and metal, ivory ear ornaments, bead
+  bracelets, steel collars, circumcision knives, sword belts, and
+  other affairs of like value. But I think that the
+  <I>apog&eacute;e</I> of his kindliness was reached when much
+  later he heard from the native tribes that we were engaged in
+  penetrating the defiles of the higher mountains. Then he sent
+  after us a swift Masai runner bearing to us a bottle of whisky
+  and a message to the effect that V. was afraid we would find it
+  very cold up there! Think of what that meant; turn it well over
+  in your mind, with all the circumstances of distance from
+  supplies, difficulty of transportation and all! We none of us
+  used whisky in the tropics, so we later returned it with a
+  suitable explanation and thanks as being too good to waste.</P>
+
+  <P>Next morning, under guidance of our friend's boy, we set out
+  for the Lower Benches, leaving N'gombe Brown and his outfit to
+  camp indefinitely until we needed him for the return journey.</P>
+
+  <P>The whole lie of the land hereabout is, roughly speaking, in a
+  series of shelves. Behind us were the high mountains&mdash;the
+  Fourth Bench; we had been travelling on the plateau of the
+  Loieta&mdash;the Third Bench; now we were to penetrate some
+  apparently low hills down an unexpected thousand feet to the
+  Second Bench. This was smaller, perhaps only five miles at its
+  widest. Its outer rim consisted also of low hills concealing a
+  drop of precipitous cliffs. There were no passes nor
+  ca&ntilde;ons here&mdash;the streams dropped over in
+  waterfalls&mdash;and precarious game trails offered the only
+  chance for descent. The First Bench was a mere ledge, a mile or
+  so wide. From it one looked down into the deep gorge of the
+  Southern Guaso Nyero, and across to a tangle of eroded mountains
+  and malpais that filled the eye. Only far off in an incredible
+  distance were other blue mountains that marked the other side of
+  the great Rift Valley.</P>
+
+  <P>Our present task was to drop from the Third Bench to the
+  Second. For some distance we followed the Narossara; then, when
+  it began to drop into its tremendous gorge, we continued along
+  the hillsides above it until, by means of various "hogs' backs"
+  and tributary ca&ntilde;ons, we were able to regain its level far
+  below. The going was rough and stony, and hard on the porters,
+  but the scenery was very wild and fine. We met the river bottom
+  again in the pleasantest oval meadow with fine big trees. The
+  mountains quite surrounded us, towering imminent above our heads.
+  Ahead of us the stream broke through between portals that rose
+  the full height of the ranges. We followed it, and found
+  ourselves on the Second Bench.</P>
+
+  <P>Here was grass, high grass in which the boys were almost lost
+  to sight. Behind us the ramparts rose sheer and high, and over
+  across the way were some low fifty-foot cliffs that marked a
+  plateau land. Between the plateau and the ranges from which we
+  had descended was a sort of slight flat valley through which
+  meandered the forest trees that marked the stream.</P>
+
+  <P>We turned to the right and marched an hour. The river
+  gradually approached the plateau, thus leaving between it and the
+  ramparts a considerable plain, and some low foothills. These
+  latter were reported to be one of the feeding grounds of the
+  greater kudu.</P>
+
+  <P>We made a most delightful camp at the edge of great trees by
+  the stream. The water flowed at the bottom of a little ravine,
+  precipitous in most places, but with gently sloping banks at the
+  spot we had chosen. It flowed rapidly over clean gravel, with a
+  hurrying, tinkling sound. A broad gravel beach was spread on the
+  hither side of it, like a spacious secret room in the jungle.
+  Here too was a clear little slope on which to sit, with the
+  thicket all about, the clean, swift little stream below, the high
+  forest arches above, and the inquisitive smaller creatures
+  hovering near. Others had been here before us, the wild things,
+  taking advantage of the easy descent to drinking
+  water&mdash;eland, buffalo, leopard, and small bucks. The air was
+  almost cloyingly sweet with a perfume like sage-brush honey.</P>
+
+  <P>Our first task was to set our boys to work clearing a space;
+  the grass was so high and rank that mere trampling had little
+  effect on it. The Baganda, Sabakaki, we had been compelled to
+  leave with the ox team. So our twenty-seven had become
+  twenty-six.</P>
+
+  <P>Next morning C. and I started out very early with one
+  gunbearer. The direction of the wind compelled us to a two hours'
+  walk before we could begin to hunt. The high grass was soaked
+  with a very heavy dew, and shortly we were as wet as though we
+  had fallen into the river. A number of hornbills and parrots
+  followed us for some distance, but soon left us in peace. We saw
+  the Roberts' gazelle and some hartebeeste.</P>
+
+  <P>When we had gained a point of vantage, we turned back and
+  began to work slowly along the base of the mountains. We kept on
+  a general level a hundred feet or so up their slope, just high
+  enough to give us a point of overlook for anything that might
+  stir either in the flat plateau foothills or the plains. We also
+  kept a sharp lookout for signs.</P>
+
+  <P>We had proceeded in this manner for an hour when in an opening
+  between two bushes below us, and perhaps five hundred yards away,
+  we saw a leopard standing like a statue, head up, a most
+  beautiful spectacle. While we watched her through the glasses,
+  she suddenly dropped flat out of sight. The cause we discovered
+  to be three hartebeeste strolling sociably along, stopping
+  occasionally to snatch a mouthful, but headed always in the
+  direction of the bushes behind which lay the great cat. Much
+  interested, we watched them. They disappeared behind the screen.
+  A sudden flash marked the leopard's spring. Two badly demoralized
+  hartebeeste stamped out into the open and away; two only. The
+  kill had been made.</P>
+
+  <P>We had only the one rifle with us, for we were supposed to be
+  out after kudu only, and were travelling as light as possible. No
+  doubt the Springfield would kill a leopard, if the bullet landed
+  in the right place. We discussed the matter. It ended, of course,
+  in our sneaking down there; I with the Springfield, and C. with
+  his knife unsheathed. Our precautions and trepidations were
+  wasted. The leopard had carried the hartebeeste bodily some
+  distance, had thrust it under a bush, and had departed. C.
+  surmised it would return towards evening.</P>
+
+  <P>Therefore we continued after kudu. We found old signs, proving
+  that the beasts visited this country, but nothing fresh. We saw,
+  however, the first sing-sing, some impalla, some klipspringer,
+  and Chanler's reed-buck.</P>
+
+  <P>At evening we made a crafty stalk atop the mesa-like foothills
+  to a point overlooking the leopard's kill. We lay here looking
+  the place over inch by inch through our glasses, when an
+  ejaculation of disgust from Kongoni called our attention. There
+  at another spot that confounded beast sat like a house cat
+  watching us cynically. Either we had come too soon, or she had
+  heard us and retired to what she considered a safe distance.
+  There was of course no chance of getting nearer; so I sat down,
+  for a steadier hold, and tried her anyway. At the shot she leaped
+  high in the air, rolled over once, then recovered her feet and
+  streaked off at full speed. Just before disappearing over a
+  slight rise, she stopped to look back. I tried her again. We
+  concluded this shot a miss, as the distance and light were such
+  that only sheer luck could have landed the bullet. However, that
+  luck was with us. Later developments showed that both shots had
+  hit. One cut a foreleg, but without breaking a bone, and the
+  other had hit the paunch. One was at 380 paces and the other at
+  490.</P>
+
+  <P>We found blood on the trail, and followed it a hundred yards
+  and over a small ridge to a wide patch of high grass. It was now
+  dark, the grass was very high, and the animal probably desperate.
+  The situation did not look good to us, badly armed as we were. So
+  we returned to camp, resolved to take up the trail again in the
+  morning.</P>
+
+  <P>Every man in camp turned out next day to help beat the grass.
+  C., with the &middot;405, stayed to direct and protect the men;
+  while I, with the Springfield, sat down at the head of the
+  ravine. Soon I could hear the shrieks, rattles, shouts, and
+  whistles of the line of men as they beat through the grass. Small
+  grass bucks and hares bounded past me; birds came whirring by. I
+  sat on a little ant hill spying as hard as I could in all
+  directions. Suddenly the beaters fell to dead silence. Guessing
+  this as a signal to me that the beast had been seen, I ran to
+  climb a higher ant hill to the left. From there I discerned the
+  animal plainly, sneaking along belly to earth, exactly in the
+  manner of a cat after a sparrow. It was not a woods-leopard, but
+  the plains-leopard, or cheetah, supposed to be a comparatively
+  harmless beast.</P>
+
+  <P>At my shot she gave one spring forward and rolled over into
+  the grass. The nearest porters yelled, and rushed in. I ran, too,
+  as fast as I could, but was not able to make myself heard above
+  the row. An instant later the beast came to its feet with a
+  savage growl and charged the nearest of the men. She was
+  crippled, and could not move as quickly as usual, but could
+  hobble along faster than her intended victim could run. This was
+  a tall and very conceited Kavirondo. He fled, but ran around in
+  circles in and out of his excited companions. The cheetah
+  followed him, and him only, with most single-minded purpose.</P>
+
+  <P>I dared not shoot while men were in the line of fire even on
+  the other side of the cheetah, for I knew the high-power bullet
+  would at that range go right on through, and I fairly split my
+  throat trying to clear the way. It seemed five minutes, though it
+  was probably only as many seconds, before I got my chance. It was
+  high time. The cheetah had reared to strike the man down.<A name=
+  'FNanchor_23_23' id="FNanchor_23_23"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_23_23'><SUP>[23]</SUP></A> My shot bowled her over.
+  She jumped to her feet again, made another dash at the thoroughly
+  scared Kavirondo, and I killed her just at his coat-tails.</P>
+
+  <P>The cheetahs ordinarily are supposed to be cowards, although
+  their size and power are equal to that of other leopards. Nobody
+  is afraid of them. Yet this particular animal charged with all
+  the ferocity and determination of the lion, and would certainly
+  have killed or badly mauled my man.<A name='FNanchor_24_24' id=
+  "FNanchor_24_24"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_24_24'><SUP>[24]</SUP></A> To be sure it had been
+  wounded, and had had all night to think about it.</P>
+
+  <P>In the relief from the tension we all burst into shrieks of
+  laughter; all except the near-victim of the scrimmage, who
+  managed only a sickly smile. Our mirth was short. Out from a
+  thicket over a hundred yards away walked one of the men, who had
+  been in no way involved in the fight, calmly announcing that he
+  had been shot. We were sceptical, but he turned his back and
+  showed us the bullet hole at the lower edge of the ribs. One of
+  my bullets, after passing through the cheetah, had ricocheted and
+  picked this poor fellow out from the whole of an empty landscape.
+  And this after I had delayed my rescue fairly to the point of
+  danger in order to avoid all chance of hurting some one!</P>
+
+  <P>We had no means of telling how deeply the bullet had
+  penetrated; so we reassured the man, and detailed two men to
+  assist him back to camp by easy stages. He did not seem to be
+  suffering much pain, and he had lost little strength.</P>
+
+  <P>At camp, however, we found that the wound was deep. C.
+  generously offered to make a forced march in order to get the boy
+  out to a hospital. By hitting directly across the rough country
+  below the benches it was possible to shorten the journey
+  somewhat, provided V. could persuade the Masai to furnish a
+  guide. The country was a desert, and the water scarce. We lined
+  up our remaining twenty-six men and selected the twelve best and
+  strongest. These we offered a month and a half's extra wages for
+  the trip. We then made a hammock out of one of the ground cloths,
+  and the same afternoon C. started. I sent with him four of my own
+  men as far as the ox-wagon for the purpose of bringing back more
+  supplies. They returned the next afternoon bringing also a report
+  from C. that all was well so far, and that he had seen a lion. He
+  made the desert trip without other casualty than the lost of his
+  riding mule, and landed the wounded man in the hospital all
+  right. In spite of C.'s expert care on the journey out, and the
+  best of treatment later, the boy, to my great distress, died
+  eleven days after reaching the hospital. C. was gone just two
+  weeks.</P>
+
+  <P>In the meantime I sent out my best trackers in all directions
+  to look for kudu signs, conceiving this the best method of
+  covering the country rapidly. In this manner I shortly determined
+  that chances were small here, and made up my mind to move down to
+  the edge of the bench where the Narossara makes its plunge.
+  Before doing so, however, I hunted for and killed a very large
+  eland bull reported by Mavrouki. This beast was not only one of
+  the largest I ever saw, but was in especially fine coat. He stood
+  five feet six inches high at the shoulder; was nine feet eight
+  inches long, without the tail; and would weigh twenty-five
+  hundred pounds. The men were delighted with this acquisition. I
+  now had fourteen porters, the three gunbearers, the cook, and the
+  two boys. They surrounded each tiny fire with switches full of
+  roasting meat; they cut off great hunks for a stew; they made
+  quantities of biltong, or jerky.</P>
+
+  <P>Next day I left Kongoni and one porter at the old camp, loaded
+  my men with what they could carry, and started out. We marched a
+  little over two hours; then found ourselves beneath a lone mimosa
+  tree about a quarter-mile from the edge of the bench. At this
+  point the stream drops into a little ca&ntilde;on preparatory to
+  its plunge; and the plateau rises ever so gently in tremendous
+  cliffs. I immediately dispatched the porters back for another
+  load. A fine sing-sing lured me across the river. I did not get
+  the sing-sing, but had a good fight with two lions, as narrated
+  elsewhere.[A]</P>
+
+  <P>In this spot we camped a number of days; did a heap of hard
+  climbing and spying; killed another lion out of a band of
+  eight;<A name='FNanchor_25_25' id="FNanchor_25_25"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_25_25'><SUP>[25]</SUP></A> thoroughly determined that
+  we had come at the wrong time for kudu, and decided on another
+  move.</P>
+
+  <P>This time our journey lasted five hours, so that our relaying
+  consumed three days. We broke back through the ramparts, by means
+  of another pass we had discovered when looking for kudu, to the
+  Third Bench again. Here we camped in the valley of
+  Lengeetoto.</P>
+
+  <P>This valley is one of the most beautiful and secluded in this
+  part of Africa. It is shaped like an ellipse, five or six miles
+  long by about three miles wide, and is completely surrounded by
+  mountains. The ramparts of the western side&mdash;those forming
+  the walls of the Fourth Bench&mdash;rise in sheer rock cliffs,
+  forest crowned. To the east, from which direction we had just
+  come, were high, rounded mountains. At sunrise they cut clear in
+  an outline of milky slate against the sky.</P>
+
+  <P>The floor of this ellipse was surfaced in gentle undulations,
+  like the low swells of a summer sea. Between each swell a
+  singing, clear-watered brook leapt and dashed or loitered through
+  its jungle. Into the mountains ran broad upward-flung valleys of
+  green grass; and groves of great forest trees marched down
+  ca&ntilde;ons and out a short distance into the plains.
+  Everything was fresh and green and cool. We needed blankets at
+  night, and each morning the dew was cool and sparkling, and the
+  sky very blue. Underneath the forest trees of the stream beds and
+  the ca&ntilde;on were leafy rooms as small as a closet, or great
+  as cathedral aisles. And in the short brush dwelt rhinoceros and
+  impalla; in the jungles were buffalo and elephant; on the plains
+  we saw giraffe, hartebeeste, zebra, duiker; and in the bases of
+  the hills we heard at evening and early morning the roaring of
+  lions.</P>
+
+  <P>In this charming spot we lingered eight days. Memba Sasa and I
+  spent most of our time trying to get one of the jungle-dwelling
+  buffalo without his getting us. In this we were finally
+  successful.<A name='FNanchor_26_26' id=
+  "FNanchor_26_26"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_26_26'><SUP>[26]</SUP></A> Then, as it was about time
+  for C. to return, we moved back to V.'s boma on the Narossara;
+  relaying, as usual, the carrying of our effects. At this time I
+  had had to lay off three more men on account of various sorts of
+  illness, so was still more cramped for transportation facilities.
+  As we were breaking camp a lioness leaped to her feet from where
+  she had been lying under a bush. So near was it to camp that I
+  had not my rifle ready. She must have been lying there within two
+  hundred yards of our tents, watching all our activities.</P>
+
+  <P>We drew into V.'s boma a little after two o'clock. The man in
+  charge of our tent did not put in an appearance until next day.
+  Fortunately V. had an extra tent, which he lent us. We camped
+  near the river, just outside the edge of the river forest. The
+  big trees sent their branches out over us very far above, while a
+  winding path led us to the banks of the river where was a dingle
+  like an inner room. After dark we sat with V. at our little camp
+  fire. It was all very beautiful&mdash;the skyful of tropical
+  stars, the silhouette of the forest shutting them out, the velvet
+  blackness of the jungle flickering with fireflies, the purer
+  outlines of the hilltops and distant mountains to the left, the
+  porters' tiny fires before the little white tents; and in the
+  distance, from the direction of V.'s boma, the irregular throb of
+  the dance drum and the occasional snatch of barbaric singing
+  borne down on the night wind from where his Wakambas were holding
+  an n'goma. A pair of ibis that had been ejected when we made camp
+  contributed intermittent outraged and raucous squawks from the
+  tiptop of some neighbouring tree.</P>
+
+  <P>FOOTNOTES:</P><A name='Footnote_23_23' id=
+  "Footnote_23_23"></A><A href='#FNanchor_23_23'>[23]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>This is an interesting fact&mdash;that she reared to strike
+    instead of springing.</P>
+  </DIV><A name='Footnote_24_24' id="Footnote_24_24"></A><A href=
+  '#FNanchor_24_24'>[24]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>It must be remembered that this beast had the evening before
+    killed a 350-pound hartebeeste with ease.</P>
+  </DIV><A name='Footnote_25_25' id="Footnote_25_25"></A><A href=
+  '#FNanchor_25_25'>[25]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>"The Land of Footprints."</P>
+  </DIV><A name='Footnote_26_26' id="Footnote_26_26"></A><A href=
+  '#FNanchor_26_26'>[26]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>"The Land of Footprints."</P>
+  </DIV>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XXXIX' id="XXXIX"></A>
+
+  <H2>XXXIX.</H2>
+
+  <P>NOTES ON THE MASAI.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>It is in no way my intention to attempt a comprehensive
+  description of this unique people. My personal observation is, of
+  course, inadequate to that task, and the numerous careful works
+  on the subject are available to the interested reader.</P>
+
+  <P>The southern branch of the race, among whom we were now
+  travelling, are very fine physically. Men close to seven feet in
+  height are not at all uncommon, and the average is well above
+  six. They are strongly and lithely made. Their skins are a
+  red-brown or bronze, generally brought to a high state of polish
+  by liberal anointing. In feature they resemble more the Egyptian
+  or Abyssinian than the negro cast of countenance. The women are
+  tall and well formed, with proud, quaintly quizzical faces. Their
+  expressions and demeanour seem to indicate more independence and
+  initiative than is usual with most savage women, but whether this
+  is actually so or not I cannot say.</P>
+
+  <P>On this imposing and pleasing physical foundation your true
+  Masai is content to build a very slight superstructure of
+  ornament. His ear-lobes are always stretched to hang down in long
+  loops, in which small medals, ornaments, decorated blocks of
+  wood, or the like, are inserted. Long, heavy ovals of ivory,
+  grooved to accommodate the flesh loop, very finely etched in
+  decorative designs, are occasionally worn as "stretchers." Around
+  the neck is a slender iron collar, and on the arms are one or two
+  glittering bracelets. The sword belt is of leather heavily
+  beaded, with a short dangling fringe of steel beads. Through this
+  the short blade is thrust. When in full dress the warrior further
+  sports a hollow iron knee bell, connected with the belt by a
+  string of cowrie shells or beads. Often is added a curious
+  triangular strip of skin fitting over the chest, and reaching
+  about to the waist. A robe or short cloak of short-haired
+  sheepskin is sometimes carried for warmth, but not at all for
+  modesty. The weapons are a long, narrow-bladed heavy spear, the
+  buffalo hide shield, the short sword, and the war club or rungs.
+  The women are always shaven-headed, wear voluminous robes of soft
+  leather, and carry a great weight of heavy wire wound into
+  anklets and stockings, and brought to a high state of polish. So
+  extensive are these decorations that they really form a sort of
+  armour, with breaks only for the elbow and the knee joints. The
+  married women wear also a great outstanding collar.</P>
+
+  <P>The Masai are pastoral, and keep immense herds and flocks.
+  Therefore they inhabit the grazing countries, and are nomadic.
+  Their villages are invariably arranged in a wide circle, the low
+  huts of mud and wattles facing inwards. The spaces between the
+  huts are filled in with thick dense thorn brush, thus enclosing a
+  strong corral, or boma. These villages are called manyattas. They
+  are built by the women in an incredibly brief space of time.
+  Indeed, an overchief stopping two days at one place has been
+  known to cause the construction of a complete village, to serve
+  only for that period. He then moved on, and the manyatta was
+  never used again! Nevertheless these low rounded huts, in shape
+  like a loaf of bread, give a fictitious impression of great
+  strength and permanency. The smooth and hardened mud resembles
+  masonry or concrete work. As a matter of fact it is the thinnest
+  sort of a shell over plaited withies. The single entrance to this
+  compound may be closed by thorn bush, so that at night, when the
+  lions are abroad, the Masai and all his herds dwell quite
+  peaceably and safely inside the boma. Twelve to twenty huts
+  constitute a village.</P>
+
+  <P>When the grass is fed down, the village moves to a new
+  location. There is some regulation about this, determined by the
+  overchiefs, so that one village does not interfere with another.
+  Beside the few articles of value or of domestic use, the only
+  things carried away from an old village are the strongly-woven
+  shield-shaped doors. These are strapped along the flanks of the
+  donkeys, while the other goods rest between. A donkey pack, Masai
+  fashion, is a marvellous affair that would not stay on ten
+  minutes for a white man.</P>
+
+  <P>The Masai perform no agriculture whatever, nor will they eat
+  game meat. They have no desire whatever for any of the white
+  man's provisions except sugar. In fact; their sole habitual diet
+  is mixed cow's blood and milk&mdash;no fruits, no vegetables, no
+  grains, rarely flesh; a striking commentary on extreme vegetarian
+  claims. The blood they obtain by shooting a very sharp-pointed
+  arrow into the neck vein of the cow. After the requisite amount
+  has been drained, the wound is closed and the animal turned into
+  the herd to recuperate. The blood and milk are then shaken
+  together in long gourds. Certainly the race seems to thrive on
+  this strange diet. Only rarely, on ceremonial occasions or when
+  transportation is difficult, do they eat mutton or goat flesh,
+  but never beef.</P>
+
+  <P>Of labour, then, about a Masai village, it follows that there
+  is practically none. The women build the manyattas; there is no
+  cooking, no tilling of the soil, no searching for wild fruits.
+  The herd have to be watched by day, and driven in at the fall of
+  night; that is the task of the boys and the youths who have not
+  gone through with the quadriennial circumcision ceremonies and
+  become El-morani, or warriors. Therefore the grown men are
+  absolutely and completely gentlemen of leisure. In civilization,
+  the less men do the more important they are inclined to think
+  themselves. It is so here. Socially the Masai consider themselves
+  several cuts above anybody else in the country. As social
+  superiority lies mostly in thinking so hard enough&mdash;so that
+  the inner belief expresses itself in the outward attitude and
+  manner&mdash;the Masai carry it off. Their haughtiness is
+  magnificent. Also they can look as unsmiling and bored as anybody
+  anywhere. Consequently they are either greatly admired, or
+  greatly hated and feared, as the case happens to be, by all the
+  other tribes. The Kikuyu young men frankly ape the customs and
+  ornaments of their powerful neighbours. Even the British
+  Government treats them very gingerly indeed, and allows these
+  economically useless savages a latitude the more agricultural
+  tribes do not enjoy. Yet I submit that any people whose property
+  is in immense herds can more easily be brought to terms than
+  those who have nothing so valuable to lose.</P>
+
+  <P>As a matter of fact the white man and the Masai have never had
+  it out. When the English, a few years since, were engaged in
+  opening the country they carried on quite a stoutly contested
+  little war with the Wakamba. These people put up so good a fight
+  that the English anticipated a most bitter struggle with the
+  Masai, whose territory lay next beyond. To their surprise the
+  Masai made peace.</P>
+
+  <P>"We have watched the war with the Wakamba," they said, in
+  effect, "and we have seen the Wakamba kill a great many of your
+  men. But more of your men came in always, and there were no more
+  Wakamba to come in and take the places of those who were killed.
+  We are not afraid. If we should war with you, we would
+  undoubtedly kill a great many of you, and you would undoubtedly
+  kill a great many of us. But there can be no use in that. We want
+  the ranges for our cattle; you want a road. Let us then
+  agree."</P>
+
+  <P>The result is that to-day the Masai look upon themselves as an
+  unconquered people, and bear themselves&mdash;<I>towards the
+  other tribes</I>&mdash;accordingly. The shrewd common sense and
+  observation evidenced above must have convinced them that war now
+  would be hopeless.</P>
+
+  <P>This acute intelligence is not at all incompatible with the
+  rather bigoted and narrow outlook on life inevitable to a people
+  whose ideals are made up of fancied superiorities over the rest
+  of mankind. Witness, the feudal aristocracies of the Middle
+  Ages.</P>
+
+  <P>With this type the underlying theory of masculine activity is
+  the military. Some outlet for energy was needed, and in war it
+  was found. Even the ordinary necessities of primitive agriculture
+  and of the chase were lacking. The Masai ate neither vegetable,
+  grain, nor wild game. His whole young manhood, then, could be
+  spent in no better occupation than the pursuit of warlike
+  glory&mdash;and cows.</P>
+
+  <P>On this rested the peculiar social structure of the people. In
+  perusing the following fragmentary account the reader must first
+  of all divest his mind of what he would, according to white man's
+  standards, consider moral or immoral. Such things must be viewed
+  from the standpoint of the people believing in them. The Masai
+  are moral in the sense that they very rigorously live up to their
+  own customs and creeds. Their women are strictly chaste in the
+  sense that they conduct no affairs outside those permitted within
+  the tribe. No doubt, from the Masai point of view, we are
+  ourselves immoral.</P>
+
+  <P>The small boy, as soon as he is big enough to be
+  responsible&mdash;and that is very early in life&mdash;is given,
+  in company with others, charge of a flock of sheep. Thence he
+  graduates to the precious herds of cows. He wears little or
+  nothing; is armed with a throwing club (a long stick), or perhaps
+  later a broad-bladed, short-headed spear of a pattern peculiar to
+  boys and young men. His life is thus over the free open hills and
+  veld until, somewhere between the ages of eighteen and
+  twenty-one, the year of the circumcision comes. Then he enters on
+  the long ceremonies that initiate him into the warrior class. My
+  knowledge of the details of this subject is limited; for while I
+  had the luck to be in Masailand on the fourth year, such things
+  are not exhibited freely. The curious reader can find more on the
+  subject in other books; but as this is confined to personal
+  experiences I will tell only what I have myself elicited.</P>
+
+  <P>The youth's shaved head is allowed to grow its hair. He hangs
+  around his brow a dangling string of bright-coloured bird skins
+  stuffed out in the shape of little cylinders, so that at a short
+  distance they look like curls. For something like a month of
+  probation he wears these, then undergoes the rite. For ten days
+  thereafter he and his companions, their heads daubed with clay
+  and ashes, clad in long black robes, live out in the brush. They
+  have no provision, but are privileged to steal what they need. At
+  the end of the ten days they return to the manyattas. A three-day
+  n'goma, or dance, now completes their transformation to the
+  El-morani class. It finishes by an obscene night dance, in the
+  course of which the new warriors select their partners.</P>
+
+  <P>For ten or twelve years these young men are El-morani. They
+  dwell in a separate manyatta. With them dwell promiscuously all
+  the young unmarried women of the tribe. There is no permanent
+  pairing off, no individual property, no marriage. Nor does this
+  constitute flagrant immorality, difficult as it may be for us to
+  see that fact. The institution, like all national institutions,
+  must have had its origin in a very real need and a very practical
+  expediency. The fighting strength of the tribe must be kept up,
+  and by the young and vigorous stock. On the other hand, every man
+  of military age must be foot free to serve in the constant wars
+  and forays. This institution is the means. And, mind you,
+  unchastity in the form of illicit intercourse outside the
+  manyatta of the El-morani, whether with her own or another tribe,
+  subjects the women to instant death.</P>
+
+  <P>The El-morani in full fighting rig are imposing. They are, as
+  I have explained, tall and of fine physique. The cherished and
+  prized weapon is the long, narrow-bladed spear. This is five and
+  six feet long, with a blade over three feet by as many inches,
+  and with a long iron shoe. In fact, only a bare hand-hold of wood
+  is provided. It is of formidable weight, but so well balanced
+  that a flip cast with the wrist will drive it clear through an
+  enemy. A short sword and a heavy-headed war club complete the
+  offensive weapons. The shield is of buffalo hide, oval in shape,
+  and decorated with a genuine heraldry, based on genealogy. A
+  circlet of black ostrich feathers in some branches surrounds the
+  face and stands high above the head. In the southern districts
+  the warriors wear two single black ostrich plumes tied one either
+  side the head, and slanting a little backwards. They walk with a
+  mincing step, so that the two feathers bob gently up and down
+  like the waving of the circus equestrienne's filmy skirts.</P>
+
+  <P>Naturally the Masai with the Zulu were the most dreaded of all
+  the tribes of Africa. They were constantly raiding in all
+  directions as far as their sphere of operations could reach,
+  capturing cattle and women as the prizes of war. Now that the
+  white man has put a stop to the ferocious intertribal wars, the
+  El-morani are out of a job. The military organization is still
+  carried on as before. What will happen to the morals of the
+  people it would be difficult to say. The twelve years of imposed
+  peace have not been long enough seriously to deteriorate the
+  people; but, inevitably, complete idleness will tell. Either the
+  people must change their ideals and become
+  industrious&mdash;which is extremely unlikely&mdash;or they will
+  degenerate.</P>
+
+  <P>As a passing thought, it is a curious and formidable fact that
+  the prohibition of intertribal wars and forays all through East
+  Central Africa had already permitted the population to increase
+  to a point of discomfort. Many of the districts are becoming so
+  crowded as to overflow. What will happen in the long run only
+  time can tell&mdash;famines are weakening things, while war at
+  least hardens a nation's fibre. This is not necessarily an
+  argument for war. Only everywhere in the world the white man
+  seems, with the best of intentions, to be upsetting natural
+  balances without substituting anything for them. We are better at
+  preventing things than causing them.</P>
+
+  <P>At the age of thirty, or thereabout, the El-morani becomes an
+  Elder. He may now drink and smoke, vices that in the Spartan days
+  of his military service were rigorously denied him. He may also
+  take a wife or wives, according to his means, and keep herds of
+  cattle. His wives he purchases from their parents, the usual
+  medium of payment being cows or sheep. The young women who have
+  been living in the El-morani village are considered quite as
+  desirable as the young virgins. If there are children, these are
+  taken over by the husband. They are considered rather a
+  recommendation than a detriment, for they prove the girl is
+  fruitful.</P>
+
+  <P>Relieved of all responsibility, the ex-warrior now has full
+  leisure to be a gentleman. He drinks a fermented liquor made from
+  milk; he takes snuff or smokes the rank native tobacco; he
+  conducts interminable diplomatic negotiations; he oversees
+  minutely the forms of ceremonials; he helps to shape the policies
+  of his manyatta, and he gives his attention to the accumulation
+  of cows.</P>
+
+  <P>The cow is the one thing that arouses the Masai's full
+  energies. He will undertake any journey, any task, any danger,
+  provided the reward therefor is horned cattle. And a cow is the
+  one thing he will on no account trade, sell, destroy. A very few
+  of them he milks, and a very few of them he periodically bleeds;
+  but the majority, to the numbers of thousands upon thousands,
+  live uselessly until they die of old age. They are branded,
+  generally on the flanks or ribs, with strange large brands, and
+  are so constantly handled that they are tamer and more gentle
+  than sheep. I have seen upwards of a thousand head in sole charge
+  of two old women on foot. These ancient dames drove the beasts in
+  a long file to water, then turned them quite easily and drove
+  them back again. Opposite our camp they halted their charges and
+  came to make us a long visit. The cattle stood in their tracks
+  until the call was over; not one offered even to stray off the
+  baked earth in search of grasses.</P>
+
+  <P>The Masai cattle king knows his property individually. Each
+  beast has its name. Some of the wealthier are worth in cattle, at
+  settler's prices, close to a hundred thousand dollars. They are
+  men of importance in their own council huts, but they lack many
+  things dear to the savage heart simply because they are unwilling
+  to part with a single head of stock in order to procure them.</P>
+
+  <P>In the old days forays and raids tended more or less to keep
+  the stock down. Since the White Man's Peace the herds are
+  increasing. In the country between the Mau Escarpment and the
+  Narossara Mountains we found the feed eaten down to the earth two
+  months before the next rainy season. In the meantime the few
+  settlers are hard put to it to buy cattle at any price wherewith
+  to stock their new farms. The situation is an anomaly which
+  probably cannot continue. Some check will have eventually to be
+  devised, either limiting the cattle, or compelling an equitable
+  sale of the surplus. Certainly the present situation represents a
+  sad economic waste&mdash;of the energies of a fine race destined
+  to rust away, and of the lives of tens of thousands of valuable
+  beasts brought into existence only to die of old age. If these
+  matchless herders and cattle breeders could be brought into
+  relation with the world's markets everybody would be the
+  better.</P>
+
+  <P>Besides his sacred cattle the Masai raises also lesser herds
+  of the hairy sheep of the country. These he used for himself only
+  on the rare occasions of solitary forced marches away from his
+  herds, or at the times of ceremony. Their real use is as a
+  trading medium&mdash;for more cattle! Certain white men and
+  Somalis conduct regular trading expeditions into Masailand,
+  bringing in small herds of cows bought with trade goods from the
+  other tribes. These they barter with the Masai for sheep. In
+  Masai estimation a cow is the most valuable thing on earth, while
+  a sheep is only a medium of exchange. With such notions it is
+  easy to see that the white man can make an advantageous exchange,
+  in spite of the Masai's well-known shrewdness at a bargain. Each
+  side is satisfied. There remains only to find a market for the
+  sheep&mdash;an easy matter. A small herd of cows will, in the
+  long run, bring quite a decent profit.</P>
+
+  <P>The Masai has very little use for white man's products. He
+  will trade for squares of cloth, beads of certain kinds and in a
+  limited quantity, brass and iron wire of heavy gauge, blankets
+  and sugar. That, barring occasional personal idiosyncrasy, is
+  about all. For these things he will pay also in sheep. Masai
+  curios are particularly difficult to get hold of. I rather like
+  them for their independence in that respect. I certainly should
+  refuse to sell my tennis shoes from my feet merely because some
+  casual Chinaman happened to admire them!</P>
+
+  <P>The women seem to occupy a position quite satisfactory to
+  themselves. To be sure they do the work; but there is not much
+  work! They appear to be well treated; at least they are always in
+  good spirits, laughing and joking with each other, and always
+  ready with quick repartee to remarks flung at them by the safari
+  boys. They visited camp freely, and would sit down for a good
+  lively afternoon of joking. Their expressions were quizzical,
+  with a shy intelligent humour. In spite of the apparent unabashed
+  freedom of their deportment they always behaved with the utmost
+  circumspection; nor did our boys ever attempt any familiarity.
+  The unobtrusive lounging presence in the background of two
+  warriors with long spears may have had something to do with
+  this.</P>
+
+  <P>The Masai government is centred in an overlord or king. His
+  orders seemed to be implicitly obeyed. The present king I do not
+  know, as the old king, Lenani, had just died at an advanced age.
+  In former days the traveller on entering Masailand was met by a
+  sub-chief. This man planted his long spear upright in the ground,
+  and the intending traveller flung over it coils of the heavy
+  wire. A very generous traveller who completely covered the spear
+  then had no more trouble. One less lavish was likely to be held
+  up for further impositions as he penetrated the country. This tax
+  was called the honga.</P>
+
+  <P>The Masai language is one of the most difficult of all the
+  native tongues. In fact, the white man is almost completely
+  unable even to pronounce many of the words. V., who is a
+  "Masai-man," who knows them intimately, and who possesses their
+  confidence, does not pretend to talk with them in their own
+  tongue, but employs the universal Swahili.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XL' id="XL"></A>
+
+  <H2>XL.</H2>
+
+  <P>THROUGH THE ENCHANTED FOREST.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>We delayed at V.'s boma three days, waiting for C. to turn up.
+  He maintained a little force of Wakamba, as the Masai would not
+  take service. The Wakamba are a hunting tribe, using both the
+  spear and the poisoned arrow to kill their game. Their bows are
+  short and powerful, and the arrows exceedingly well fashioned.
+  The poison is made from the wood of a certain fat tree, with
+  fruit like gigantic bologna sausages. It is cut fine, boiled, and
+  the product evaporated away until only a black sticky substance
+  remains. Into this the point of the arrow is dipped; and the head
+  is then protected until required by a narrow strip of buckskin
+  wound around and around it. I have never witnessed the effects of
+  this poison; but V. told me he had seen an eland die in
+  twenty-two minutes from so slight a wound in the shoulder that it
+  ran barely a hundred yards before stopping. The poison more or
+  less loses its efficiency, however, after the sticky, tarlike
+  substance has dried out.</P>
+
+  <P>I offered a half-rupee as a prize for an archery competition,
+  for I was curious to get a view of their marksmanship. The
+  bull's-eye was a piece of typewriter paper at thirty
+  paces.<A name='FNanchor_27_27' id="FNanchor_27_27"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_27_27'><SUP>[27]</SUP></A> This they managed to
+  puncture only once out of fifteen tries, though they never missed
+  it very widely. V. seemed quite put out at this poor showing, so
+  I suppose they can ordinarily do better; but I imagine they are a
+  good deal like our hunting Indians&mdash;poor shots, but very
+  skilful at stalking close to a beast.</P>
+
+  <P>Our missing porter, with the tent, was brought in next
+  afternoon by Kongoni, who had gone in search of him. The man was
+  a big, strong Kavirondo. He was sullen, and merely explained that
+  he was "tired." This excuse for a five hours' march after eight
+  days' rest! I fined him eight rupees, which I gave Kongoni, and
+  ordered him twenty-five lashes. Six weeks later he did the same
+  trick. C. allotted him fifty lashes, and had him led thereafter
+  by a short rope around the neck. He was probably addicted to
+  opium. This was the only man to be formally kibokoed on the whole
+  trip&mdash;a good testimony at once to C.'s management, the
+  discrimination we had used in picking them out, and the settled
+  reputations we had by now acquired.</P>
+
+  <P>After C.'s return we prepared to penetrate straight back
+  through the great rampart of mountains to the south and west.</P>
+
+  <P>We crossed the bush-grown plains, and entered a gently rising
+  long ca&ntilde;on flanked on either side by towering ranges that
+  grew higher and higher the farther we proceeded. In the very
+  centre of the mountains, apparently, this ca&ntilde;on ended in a
+  small round valley. There appeared to be no possible exit, save
+  by the way we had come, or over the almost perpendicular ridges a
+  thousand feet or more above. Nevertheless, we discovered a narrow
+  ravine that slanted up into the hills to the left. Following it
+  we found ourselves very shortly in a great forest on the side of
+  a mountain. Hanging creepers brushed our faces, tangled vines
+  hung across our view, strange and unexpected openings offered
+  themselves as a means through which we could see a little closer
+  into the heart of mystery. The air was cool and damp and dark.
+  The occasional shafts of sunlight or glimpses of blue sky served
+  merely to accentuate the soft gloom. Save that we climbed always,
+  we could not tell where we were going.</P>
+
+  <P>The ascent occupied a little over an hour. Then through the
+  tree trunks and undergrowth we caught the sky-line of the crest.
+  When we topped this we took a breath, and prepared ourselves for
+  a corresponding descent. But in a hundred yards we popped out of
+  the forest to find ourselves on a new level. The Fourth Bench had
+  been attained.</P>
+
+  <P>It was a grass country of many low, rounded hills and dipping
+  valleys, with fine isolated oaklike trees here and there in the
+  depressions, and compact, beautiful oaklike groves thrown over
+  the hills like blankets. Well-kept, green, trim, intimate, it
+  should have had church spires and gray roofs in appropriate
+  spots. It was a refreshment to the eye after the great and
+  austere spaces among which we had been dwelling, repose to the
+  spirit after the alert and dangerous lands. The dark-curtained
+  forest seemed, fancifully, an enchantment through which we had
+  gained to this remote smiling land, nearest of all to the blue
+  sky.</P>
+
+  <P>We continued south for two days; and then, as the narrative
+  will show, were forced to return. We found it always the same
+  type; pleasant sleepy little valleys winding around and between
+  low hills crowned with soft groves and forests. It was for all
+  the world like northern Surrey, or like some of the live oak
+  country of California. Only this we soon discovered: in spite of
+  the enchantment of the magic-protecting forest, the upper benches
+  too were subject to the spell that lies over all Africa. These
+  apparently little valleys were in reality the matter of an hour's
+  journey to cross; these rounded hills, to all seeming only two
+  good golf strokes from bottom to top, were matters of serious
+  climbing; these compact, squared groves of oaklike trees were
+  actually great forests of giants in which one could lose one's
+  self for days, in which roamed herds of elephant and buffalo. It
+  looked compact because we could see all its constituent elements.
+  As a matter of fact, it was neat and tidy; only we were, as
+  usual, too small for it.</P>
+
+  <P>At the end of two hours' fast marching we had made the
+  distance, say, from the clubhouse to the second hole. Then we
+  camped in a genuinely little grove of really small trees
+  overlooking a green valley bordered with wooded hills. The
+  prospect was indescribably delightful; a sort of Sunday-morning
+  landscape of groves and green grass and a feeling of church
+  bells.</P>
+
+  <P>Only down the valley, diminished by distance, all afternoon
+  Masai warriors, in twos and threes, trooped by, mincing along so
+  that their own ostrich feathers would bob up and down, their
+  spears held aslant.</P>
+
+  <P>We began to realize that we were indeed in a new country when
+  our noon thermometer registered only 66 degrees, and when at
+  sunrise the following morning it stood at 44 degrees. To us,
+  after eight months under the equator, this was bitter
+  weather!</P>
+
+  <P>FOOTNOTES:</P><A name='Footnote_27_27' id=
+  "Footnote_27_27"></A><A href='#FNanchor_27_27'>[27]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>Eight by ten and a half inches.</P>
+  </DIV>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XLI' id="XLI"></A>
+
+  <H2>XLI.</H2>
+
+  <P>NAIOKOTUKU.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>Next morning we marched on up the beautiful valley through
+  shoulder-high grasses wet with dew. At the end of two hours we
+  came to the limit of Leyeye's knowledge of the country. It would
+  now be necessary to find savage guides.</P>
+
+  <P>Accordingly, while we made camp, C., with Leyeye as
+  interpreter, departed in search of a Masai village. So tall and
+  rank grew the grass, that we had to clear it out as one would
+  clear brushwood in order to make room for our tents.</P>
+
+  <P>Several hours later C. returned. He had found a very large
+  village; but unfortunately the savages were engaged in a big
+  n'goma which could not be interrupted by mere business. However,
+  the chief was coming to make a friendly call. When the n'goma
+  should be finished, he would be delighted to furnish us with
+  anything we might desire.</P>
+
+  <P>Almost on the heels of this the chief arrived. He was a fine
+  old savage, over six feet tall, of well proportioned figure, and
+  with a shrewd, intelligent face. The n'goma had him to a limited
+  extent, for he stumbled over tent ropes, smiled a bit
+  uncertainly, and slumped down rather suddenly when he had meant
+  to sit. However, he stumbled, smiled, and slumped with
+  unassailable dignity.</P>
+
+  <P>From beneath his goatskin robe he produced a long ornamented
+  gourd, from which he offered us a drink of fermented milk. He
+  took our refusal good-naturedly. The gourd must have held a
+  gallon, but he got away with all of its contents in the course of
+  the interview; also several pints of super-sweetened coffee which
+  we doled out to him a little at a time, and which he seemed to
+  appreciate extravagantly.</P>
+
+  <P>Through Leyeye we exchanged the compliments of the day, and,
+  after the African custom, told each other how important we were.
+  Our visitor turned out to be none other than the brother of
+  Lenani, the paramount chief of all the Masai. I forget what I
+  was, either the brother of King George or the nephew of Theodore
+  Roosevelt&mdash;the only two white men <I>every</I> native has
+  heard of. It may be that both of us were mistaken, but from his
+  evident authority over a very wide district we were inclined to
+  believe our visitor.</P>
+
+  <P>We told him we wanted guides through the hills to the
+  southward. He promised them in a most friendly fashion.</P>
+
+  <P>"I do not know the white man," said he. "I live always in
+  these mountains. But my brother Lenani told me ten years ago that
+  some day the white man would come into my country. My brother
+  told me that when the white man came travelling in my country I
+  must treat him well, for the white man is a good friend but a bad
+  enemy. I have remembered my brother Lenani's words, though they
+  were spoken a long time ago. The white man has been very long in
+  coming; but now he is here. Therefore I have brought you milk
+  to-day, and to-morrow I will send you sheep; and later I will
+  send young men who know the hills to take you where you wish to
+  go."</P>
+
+  <P>We expressed gratification, and I presented him with a Marble
+  fish knife. The very thin blade and the ingenious manner in which
+  the two halves of the handle folded forward over it pleased him
+  immensely.</P>
+
+  <P>"No one but myself shall ever use this knife," said he.</P>
+
+  <P>He had no pockets, but he tucked it away in his armpit,
+  clamped the muscles down over it, and apparently forgot it. At
+  least he gave it no further attention, used his hands as usual,
+  but retained it as securely as in a pocket.</P>
+
+  <P>"To-morrow," he promised at parting, "very early in the
+  morning, I will send my own son and another man to guide you; and
+  I will send a sheep for your meat."</P>
+
+  <P>We arose "very early," packed our few affairs, picked out four
+  porters&mdash;and sat down to wait. Our plan was to cruise for
+  five days with as light and mobile an outfit as possible, and
+  then to return for fresh supplies. Billy would take charge of the
+  main camp during our absence. As advisers, we left her Abba Ali,
+  Memba Sasa, and Mohammed.</P>
+
+  <P>At noon we were still waiting. The possibility of doing a full
+  day's journey was gone, but we thought we might at least make a
+  start. At one o'clock, just as we had about given up hope, the
+  Masai strolled in. They were beautiful, tall, straight youths,
+  finely formed, with proud features and a most graceful carriage.
+  In colour they were as though made of copper bronze, with the
+  same glitter of high lights from their fine-textured skins. Even
+  in this chilly climate they were nearly naked. One carried a
+  spear, the other a bow and arrow.</P>
+
+  <P>Joyously we uprose&mdash;and sat down again. We had provided
+  an excellent supply of provisions for our guides; but on looking
+  over the lot they discovered nothing&mdash;absolutely
+  nothing&mdash;that met their ideas.</P>
+
+  <P>"What <I>do</I> they want?" we asked Leyeye in despair.</P>
+
+  <P>"They say they will eat nothing but sheep," he reported.</P>
+
+  <P>We remembered old Naiokotuku's promise of sending us sheep,
+  sneered cynically at the faith of savages, and grimly set forth
+  to see what we could buy in the surrounding country. But we
+  wronged the old man. Less than a mile from camp we met men
+  driving in as presents not one, but <I>two</I> sheep. So we
+  abandoned our shopping tour and returned to camp. By the time one
+  of the sheep had been made into mutton it was too late to start.
+  The Masai showed symptoms of desiring to go back to the village
+  for the night. This did not please us. We called them up, and
+  began extravagantly to admire their weapons, begging to examine
+  them. Once we had them in our hands we craftily discoursed as
+  follows:&mdash;</P>
+
+  <P>"These are beautiful weapons, the most beautiful we have ever
+  seen. Since you are going so spend the night in our camp, and
+  since we greatly fear that some of our men might steal these
+  beautiful weapons, we will ourselves guard them for you carefully
+  from theft until morning."</P>
+
+  <P>So saying, we deposited them inside the tent. Then we knew we
+  had our Masai safe. They would never dream of leaving while the
+  most cherished of their possessions were in hostage.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XLII' id="XLII"></A>
+
+  <H2>XLII.</H2>
+
+  <P>SCOUTING IN THE ELEPHANT FOREST.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>Here we were finally off at dawn. It was a very chilly, wet
+  dawn, with the fog so thick that we could see not over ten feet
+  ahead. We had four porters, carrying about twenty-five pounds
+  apiece of the bare necessities, Kongoni, and Leyeye. The Masai
+  struck confidently enough through the mist. We crossed neck-deep
+  grass flats&mdash;where we were thoroughly soaked&mdash;climbed
+  hills through a forest, skirted apparently for miles an immense
+  reed swamp. As usual when travelling strange country in a fog, we
+  experienced that queer feeling of remaining in the same spot
+  while fragments of near-by things are slowly paraded by. When at
+  length the sun's power cleared the mists, we found ourselves in
+  the middle of a forest country of high hills.</P>
+
+  <P>Into this forest we now plunged, threading our way here and
+  there where the animal trails would take us, looking always for
+  fresh elephant spoor. It would have been quite impossible to have
+  moved about in any other fashion. The timber grew on hillsides,
+  and was very lofty and impressive; and the tropical undergrowth
+  grew tall, rank, and impenetrable. We could proceed only by means
+  of the kind assistance of the elephant, the buffalo, and the
+  rhinoceros.</P>
+
+  <P>Elephant spoor we found, but none made later than three weeks
+  before. The trails were broad, solid paths through the forest, as
+  ancient and beaten as though they had been in continuous use for
+  years. Unlike the rhino and buffalo trails, they gave us head
+  room and to spare. The great creatures had by sheer might cut
+  their way through the dense, tough growth, leaving twisted,
+  splintered, wrecked jungle behind them, but no impediment.</P>
+
+  <P>By means of these beautiful trails we went quietly,
+  penetrating farther and farther into the jungle. Our little
+  procession of ten made no noise. If we should strike fresh
+  elephant tracks, thus would we hunt them, with all our worldly
+  goods at our backs, so that at night we could camp right on the
+  trail.</P>
+
+  <P>The day passed almost without incident.</P>
+
+  <P>Once a wild crash and a snort told of a rhinoceros, invisible,
+  but very close. We huddled together, our rifles ready, uncertain
+  whether or not the animal would burst from the leafy screen at
+  our very faces. The Masai stood side by side, the long spear
+  poised, the bow bent, fine, tense figures in bronze.</P>
+
+  <P>Near sundown we found ourselves by a swift little stream in
+  the bottom of a deep ravine. Here we left the men to make camp,
+  and ourselves climbed a big mountain on the other side. It gave
+  us a look abroad over a wilderness of hills, forested heavily,
+  and a glimpse of the landfall far away where no white man had
+  ever been. This was as far south as we were destined to get,
+  though at the time we did not know it. Our plan was to push on
+  two days more. Near the top of the ridge we found the
+  unmistakable tracks of the bongo. This is interesting to
+  zoologists in that it extends the southward range of this rare
+  and shy beast.</P>
+
+  <P>Just at dark we regained our camp. It was built California
+  fashion&mdash;for the first and last time in Africa: blankets
+  spread on canvas under the open sky and a gipsy fire at our feet,
+  over which I myself cooked our very simple meal. As we were
+  smoking our pipes in sleepy content, Leyeye and the two Masai
+  appeared for a shauri. Said the Masai,&mdash;</P>
+
+  <P>"We have taken you over the country we know. There are
+  elephants there sometimes, but there are no elephants there now.
+  We can take you farther, and if you wish us to do so, we will do
+  so; but we know no more of the country than you do. But now if we
+  return to the manyatta to-morrow, we can march two hours to where
+  are some Wanderobo; and the Wanderobo know this country and will
+  take you through it. If it pleases you, one of us will go get the
+  Wanderobo, and the other will stay with you to show good
+  faith."</P>
+
+  <P>We rolled our eyes at each other in humorous despair. Here at
+  the very beginning of the reconnaissance we had run against the
+  stone wall of African indirectness and procrastination. And just
+  as we thought we had at last settled everything!</P>
+
+  <P>"Why," we inquired, "were not the Wanderobo sent at first,
+  instead of yourselves?"</P>
+
+  <P>"Because," they replied, with truly engaging frankness, "our
+  chief, Naiokotuku, thought that perhaps we might find elephant
+  here in the country we know; and then we should get for ourselves
+  all the presents you would give for finding elephant. But the
+  elephant are not here now, so the Wanderobo will get part of the
+  present."</P>
+
+  <P>That was certainly candid. After some further talk we decided
+  there was no help for it; we must return to camp for a new
+  start.</P>
+
+  <P>At this decision the Masai brightened. They volunteered to set
+  off early with Leyeye, to push ahead of us rapidly, and to have
+  the Wanderobo in camp by the time we reached there. We concealed
+  somewhat cynical smiles, and agreed.</P>
+
+  <P>The early start was made, but when we reached camp we found,
+  not the Wanderobo, but Leyeye and the Masai huddled over a fire.
+  This was exasperating, but we could not say much. After all, the
+  whole matter was no right of ours, but a manifestation of
+  friendship on the part of Naiokotuku. In the early afternoon the
+  sky cleared, and the ambassadors departed, promising faithfully
+  to be back before we slept. We spent the day writing and in
+  gazing at the vivid view of the hillside, the forest, and the
+  distant miniature prospect before us. Finally we discovered what
+  made it in essence so strangely familiar. In vividness and
+  clarity&mdash;even in the crudity of its tones&mdash;it was
+  exactly like a coloured photograph!</P>
+
+  <P>Of course the savages did not return that evening, nor did we
+  really expect them. Just as a matter of form we packed up the
+  next morning, and sat down to wait. Shortly before noon Leyeye
+  and the Masai returned, bringing with them two of the strange,
+  shy, forest hunters.</P>
+
+  <P>But by this time we had talked things over thoroughly. The
+  lure of the greater kudu was regaining the strength it had lost
+  by a long series of disappointments. We had not time left for
+  both a thorough investigation of the forests and a raid in the
+  dry hills of the west after kudu. Mavrouki said he knew of a
+  place where that animal ranged. So we had come to a decision.</P>
+
+  <P>We called the Masai and Wanderobo before us. They squatted in
+  a row, their spears planted before them. We sat in canvas chairs.
+  Leyeye standing, translated. The affair was naturally of the
+  greatest deliberation. In the indirect African manner we began
+  our shauri.</P>
+
+  <P>We asked one simple question at a time, dealing with one
+  simple phase of the subject. This phase we treated from several
+  different points of view, in order to be absolutely certain that
+  it was understood. To these questions we received replies in this
+  manner:&mdash;</P>
+
+  <P>"Yes, the Wanderobo told us," they knew the forest; they knew
+  how to go about in the forest; they understood how to find their
+  way in the forest. They knew the elephant; they had seen the
+  elephant many times in the forest; they knew where the elephant
+  ranged in the forest&mdash;and so on through every piece of
+  information we desired. It is the usual and only sure way of
+  questioning natives.</P>
+
+  <P>Thus we learned that the elephant range extended south through
+  the forests for about seven days' travel; that at this time of
+  year the beasts might be anywhere on that range. This confirmed
+  our decision. Then said we to Leyeye:&mdash;</P>
+
+  <P>"Tell the Masai that the bwana m'kubwa is most pleased with
+  them, and that he is pleased with the way they have worked for
+  him, and that he is pleased with the presents they have brought
+  him. Tell them that he has no goods here with him, but that he
+  has sent men back to the boma of bwana Kingozi<A name=
+  'FNanchor_28_28' id="FNanchor_28_28"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_28_28'><SUP>[28]</SUP></A> for blankets and wire and
+  cloth, and when those men return he will make a good present to
+  these Masai and to Naiokotuku, their chief.</P>
+
+  <P>"Tell the Wanderobo that the bwana m'kubwa is pleased with
+  them, and that he thanks them for coming so far to tell him of
+  the elephant, and that he believes they have told him the truth.
+  Tell them the bwana m'kubwa will not fight the elephant now,
+  because he has not the time, but must go to attend to his
+  affairs. But later, when two years have gone, he will make
+  another safari, and will come back to this country, and will
+  again ask these men to lead him out where he can fight the
+  elephant. And in the meantime he will give them rupees with which
+  to pay their hut tax to the Government."</P>
+
+  <P>After various compliments the sitting rose. Then we packed up
+  for a few hours' march. In a short time we passed the chief's
+  village. He came out to say good-bye. A copper bronze youth
+  accompanied him, lithe as a leopard.</P>
+
+  <P>"My men have told me your words," said he. "I live always in
+  these mountains, and my young men will bring me word when you
+  return. I am glad the white men have come to see me. I shall have
+  the Wanderobo ready to take you to fight the elephant when you
+  return."</P>
+
+  <P>He then instructed the young man to accompany us for the
+  purpose of bringing back the presents we had promised. We shook
+  hands in farewell, and so parted from this friendly and powerful
+  chief.</P>
+
+  <P>FOOTNOTES:</P><A name='Footnote_28_28' id=
+  "Footnote_28_28"></A><A href='#FNanchor_28_28'>[28]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>V.'s native name&mdash;the Master with the Red Beard.</P>
+  </DIV>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XLIII' id="XLIII"></A>
+
+  <H2>XLIII.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE TOPI CAMP.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>At the next camp we stayed for nearly a week.</P>
+
+  <P>The country was charming. Mountains surrounded the long
+  ellipse, near one edge of which we had pitched our tents. The
+  ellipse was some ten miles long by four or five wide, and its
+  surface rolled in easy billows to a narrow neck at the lower end.
+  There we could just make out in the far distance a conical hill
+  partly closing the neck. Atop the hill was a Masai manyatta, very
+  tiny, with indistinct crawling red and brown blotches that meant
+  cattle and sheep. Beyond the hill, and through the opening in the
+  ellipse, we could see to another new country of hills and meadows
+  and forest groves. In this clear air they were microscopically
+  distinct. No blue of atmosphere nor shimmer of heat blurred their
+  outlines. They were merely made small.</P>
+
+  <P>Our camp was made in the open above a tiny stream. We saw
+  wonderful sunrises and sunsets, and always spread out before us
+  was the sweep of our plains and the unbroken ramparts that hemmed
+  us in. From these mountains meandered small stream-ways marked by
+  narrow strips of trees and brush, but the most of the valley was
+  of high green grass. Occasional ant hills ten feet tall rose
+  conical from the earth; and the country was pleasingly broken and
+  modelled, so that one continually surmounted knolls, low, round
+  ridges, and the like. Of such conditions are surprises made.</P>
+
+  <P>The elevation here was some 7,000 feet, so that the nights
+  were cold and the days not too warm. Our men did not fancy this
+  change of weather. A good many of them came down with the fever
+  always latent in their systems, and others suffered from
+  bronchial colds.</P>
+
+  <P>At one time we had down sick eleven men out of our slender
+  total. However, I believe, in spite of these surface symptoms,
+  that the cold air did them good. It certainly improved our own
+  appetites and staying power.</P>
+
+  <P>In the thirty or forty square miles of our valley were many
+  herds of varied game. We here for the first time found Neuman's
+  hartebeeste. The type at Narossara, and even in Lengetto, was the
+  common Coke's hartebeeste, so that between these closely allied
+  species there interposes at this point only the barriers of a
+  climb and a forest. These animals and the zebra were the most
+  plentiful of the game. The zebra were brilliantly white and
+  black, with magnificent coats. Thompson's and Roberts' gazelles
+  were here in considerable numbers, eland, Roosevelt's
+  wildebeeste, giraffe, the smaller grass antelopes, and a fair
+  number of topi. In the hills we saw buffalo sign, several
+  cheetah, and heard many lions.</P>
+
+  <P>It had been our first plan that C. should return immediately
+  to V.'s boma after supplies, but in view of the abundance of game
+  we decided to wait over a day. We much desired to get four topi,
+  and this seemed a good chance to carry some of them out. Also we
+  wished to decide for certain whether or not the hartebeeste here
+  was really of the Neuman variety.</P>
+
+  <P>We had great luck. Over the very first hill from camp we came
+  upon a herd of about a dozen topi, feeding on a hill across the
+  way. I knocked down the first one standing at just 250 paces. The
+  herd then split and broke to right and left. By shooting very
+  carefully and steadily I managed to kill three more before they
+  were out of range. The last shot was at 325 paces. In all I fired
+  seven shots, and hit six times. This was the best shooting I did
+  in Africa&mdash;or anywhere else&mdash;and is a first-rate
+  argument for the Springfield and the high velocity, sharp-pointed
+  bullet.</P>
+
+  <P>Overjoyed at our luck in collecting these animals so promptly,
+  so near camp, and at a time so very propitious for handling the
+  trophies, we set to the job of skinning and cutting up. The
+  able-bodied men all came out from camp to carry in the meat. They
+  appeared, grinning broadly, for they had had no meat since
+  leaving the Narossara. C. and I saw matters well under way, and
+  then went on to where I had seen a cheetah the day before. Hardly
+  were we out of sight when two lions sauntered over the hill and
+  proceeded to appropriate the meat! The two men in charge promptly
+  withdrew. A moment later a dozen porters on their way out from
+  camp topped the hill and began to yell at the lions. The latter
+  then slowly and reluctantly retreated.</P>
+
+  <P>We were very sorry we had not stayed. The valley seemed
+  populated with lions, but in general they were, for some reason,
+  strictly nocturnal. By day they inhabited the fastnesses of the
+  mountain ranges. We never succeeded in tracing them in that large
+  and labyrinthine country; nor at any time could we induce them to
+  come to kills. Either their natural prey was so abundant that
+  they did not fancy ready-killed food; or, what is more likely,
+  the cold nights prevented the odour of the carcasses from
+  carrying far. We heard lions every night; and every morning we
+  conscientiously turned out before daybreak to crawl up to our
+  bait through the wet, cold grass, but with no results. That very
+  night we were jerked from a sound sleep by a tremendous roar
+  almost in camp. So close was it that it seemed to each of us but
+  just outside the tent. We came up all standing. The lion,
+  apparently, was content with that practical joke, for he moved
+  off quietly. Next morning we found where the tracks had led down
+  to water, not ten yards away.</P>
+
+  <P>We spent the rest of that day spying on the game herds. It is
+  fascinating work, to lie belly down on a tall ant hill, glasses
+  steadied by elbows, picking out the individual animals and
+  discussing them low-voiced with a good companion. C. and I looked
+  over several hundred hartebeeste, trying to decide their
+  identity. We were neither of us familiar with the animal, and had
+  only recollections of the book distinctions. Finally I picked out
+  one that seemed to present the most marked
+  characteristics&mdash;and missed him clean at 280 yards. Then I
+  took three shots at 180 yards to down a second choice. The poor
+  shooting was forgotten, however, in our determination that this
+  was indeed Neumanii.</P>
+
+  <P>A vain hunt for lions occupied all the next day. The third
+  morning C. started for the boma, leaving Billy and me to look
+  about us as we willed. Shortly after he had departed a delegation
+  of Masai came in, dressed in their best, and bearing presents of
+  milk. Leyeye was summoned as interpreter.</P>
+
+  <P>The Masai informed us that last night a lion had leapt the
+  thorn walls of their boma, had pressed on through the fires, had
+  seized a two-year-old steer, and had dragged the beast outside.
+  Then the pursuit with spears and firebrands had become too hot
+  for him, so that he had dropped his victim and retired. They
+  desired (<I>a</I>) medicine for the steer, (<I>b</I>) magic to
+  keep that lion away, (<I>c</I>) that I should assist them in
+  hunting the lion down.</P>
+
+  <P>I questioned them closely, and soon discovered both that the
+  lion must have been very bold, and also that he had received a
+  pretty lively reception. Magic to keep him away seemed like a
+  safe enough proposition, for the chances were he would keep
+  himself away.</P>
+
+  <P>Therefore I filled a quart measure with clear water, passed my
+  hand across its untroubled surface&mdash;and lo! it turned a
+  clear bright pink!</P>
+
+  <P>Long-drawn exclamations of "Eigh! Eigh!" greeted this magic,
+  performed by means of permanganate crystals held between the
+  fingers.</P>
+
+  <P>"With this bathe the wounds of your steer. Then sprinkle the
+  remainder over your cattle. The lion will not return," said I.
+  Then reflecting that I was to be some time in the country, and
+  that the lion might get over his scare, I added, "The power of
+  this magic is three days."</P>
+
+  <P>They departed very much impressed. A little later Memba Sasa
+  and I followed them. The manyatta was most picturesquely placed
+  atop the conical hill at the foot of the valley. From its
+  elevation we could see here and there in the distance the
+  variegated blotches of red and white and black that represented
+  the cattle herds. Innumerable flocks of sheep and goats, under
+  charge of the small boys and youths, fed nearer at hand. The low
+  smooth-plastered huts, with their abattis of thorn bush between,
+  crowned the peak like a chaplet. Outside it sat a number of
+  elders sunning themselves, and several smiling, good-natured
+  young women, probably the spoiled darlings of these plutocrats.
+  One of these damsels spake Swahili, so we managed to exchange
+  compliments. They told us exactly when and how the lion had gone.
+  Three nimble old gentlemen accompanied us when we left. They were
+  armed with spears; and they displayed the most extraordinary
+  activity, skipping here and there across the ravines and through
+  the brush, casting huge stones into likely cover, and generally
+  making themselves ubiquitous. However, we did not come up with
+  the lion.</P>
+
+  <P>In our clinic that evening appeared one of the men claiming to
+  suffer from rheumatism. I suspected him, and still suspect him,
+  of malingering in advance in order to get out of the hard work we
+  must soon undertake, but had no means of proving my suspicion.
+  However, I decided to administer asperin. We possessed only the
+  powdered form of the drug. I dumped about five grains on his
+  tongue, and was about to proffer him the water with which to wash
+  it down&mdash;when he inhaled sharply! I do not know the precise
+  effect of asperin in the windpipe, but it is not pleasant. The
+  boy thought himself bewitched. His eyes stuck out of his head; he
+  gasped painfully; he sank to the ground; he made desperate
+  efforts to bolt out into the brush. By main strength we
+  restrained him, and forced him to swallow the water. Little by
+  little he recovered. Next night I missed him from the clinic, and
+  sent Abba Ali in search. The man assured Abba Ali most vehemently
+  that the medicine was wonderful, that every trace of rheumatism
+  had departed, that he never felt better in his life, and that
+  (important point) he was perfectly able to carry a load on the
+  morrow.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XLIV' id="XLIV"></A>
+
+  <H2>XLIV.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE UNKNOWN LAND.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>C. returned the next day from V.'s boma, bringing more potio
+  and some trade goods. We sent a good present back to Naiokotuku,
+  and prepared for an early start into the new country.</P>
+
+  <P>We marched out of the lower end of our elliptical valley
+  towards the miniature landscape we had seen through the opening.
+  But before we reached it we climbed sharp to the right around the
+  end of the mountains, made our way through a low pass, and so
+  found ourselves in a new country entirely. The smooth, undulating
+  green-grass plains were now superseded by lava expanses grown
+  with low bushes. It was almost exactly like the sage-brush
+  deserts of Arizona and New Mexico&mdash;the same coarse sand and
+  lava footing, the same deeply eroded barrancas, the same
+  scattered round bushes dotted evenly over the scene. We saw here
+  very little game. Across the way lay another range of low
+  mountains clothed darkly with dull green, like the
+  chaparral-covered coast ranges of California. In one place was a
+  gunsight pass through which we could see other distant blue
+  mountains. We crossed the arid plain and toiled up through the
+  notch pass.</P>
+
+  <P>The latter made very difficult footing indeed, for the entire
+  surface of the ground was covered with smooth, slippery boulders
+  and rocks of iron and quartz. What had so smoothed them I do not
+  know, for they seemed to be ill-placed for water erosion. The
+  boys with their packs atop found this hard going, and we
+  ourselves slipped and slid and bumped in spite of our
+  caution.</P>
+
+  <P>Once through the pass we found ourselves overlooking a wide
+  prospect of undulating thorn scrub from which rose occasional
+  bushy hills, solitary buttes, and bold cliffs. It was a
+  thick-looking country to make a way through.</P>
+
+  <P>Nevertheless somewhere here dwelt the Kudu, so in we plunged.
+  The rest of the day&mdash;and of days to follow&mdash;we spent in
+  picking a way through the thorn scrub and over loose rocks and
+  shifting stones. A stream bed contained an occasional water hole.
+  Tall aloes were ablaze with red flowers. The country looked arid,
+  the air felt dry, the atmosphere was so clear that a day's
+  journey seemed&mdash;usually&mdash;but the matter of a few hours.
+  Only rarely did we enjoy a few moments of open travel. Most of
+  the time the thorns caught at us. In the mountain passes were
+  sometimes broad trails of game or of the Masai cattle. The
+  country was harsh and dry and beautiful with the grays and dull
+  greens of arid-land brush, or with the soft atmospheric tints of
+  arid-land distances. Game was fairly common, but rather difficult
+  to find. There were many buffalo, a very few zebra, leopards,
+  hyenas, plenty of impalla, some sing-sing, a few eland, abundant
+  wart-hog, Thompson's gazelle, and duiker. We never lacked for
+  meat when we dared shoot it, but we were after nobler game. The
+  sheep given us by Naiokotuku followed along under charge of the
+  syces.</P>
+
+  <P>When we should run quite out of meat, we intended to eat them.
+  We delayed too long, however. One evening the fool boy tied them
+  to a thorn bush; one of them pulled back, the thorns bit, and
+  both broke loose and departed into the darkness. Of course
+  everybody pursued, but we could not recapture them. Ten minutes
+  later the hyenas broke into the most unholy laughter. We could
+  not blame them; the joke was certainly on us.</P>
+
+  <P>In passing, the cachinnations of the laughing hyena are rather
+  a series of high-voiced self-conscious titters than laughter.
+  They sound like the stage idea of a lot of silly and rather
+  embarrassed old maids who have been accused by some rude man of
+  "taking notice." This call is rarely used; indeed, I never heard
+  it but the once. The usual note is a sort of moaning howl,
+  impossible to describe, but easy to recognize.</P>
+
+  <P>Thus we penetrated gradually deeper and deeper into this wild
+  country; through low mountains, over bush-clad plains, into thorn
+  jungles, down wide valleys, over hill-divided plateaus. Late in
+  the afternoon we would make camp. Sometimes we had good water;
+  more often not. In the evening the throb of distant drums and
+  snatches of intermittent wailing song rose and fell with the
+  little night breezes.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XLV' id="XLV"></A>
+
+  <H2>XLV.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE ROAN.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>Our last camp, before turning back, we pitched about two
+  o'clock one afternoon. Up to this time we had marched steadily
+  down wide valleys, around the end of mountain ranges, moving from
+  one room to the other of this hill-divided plateau. At last we
+  ended on a slope that descended gently to water. It was grown
+  sparingly with thorn trees, among which we raised our tents. Over
+  against us, and across several low swells of grass and
+  scrub-grown hills, was a range of mountains. Here, Mavrouki
+  claimed, dwelt roan antelope.</P>
+
+  <P>We settled down quite happily. The country round about was
+  full of game; the weather was cool, the wide sweeps of country,
+  the upward fling of mountains and buttes were much like some
+  parts of our great West. Almost every evening the thunderstorms
+  made gorgeous piled effects in the distance. At night the lions
+  and hyenas roared or howled, and some of the tiny fever owls
+  impudently answered them back.</P>
+
+  <P>Various adventures came our way, some of which have been
+  elsewhere narrated. Here we killed the very big buffalo that
+  nearly got Billy.<A name='FNanchor_29_29' id=
+  "FNanchor_29_29"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_29_29'><SUP>[29]</SUP></A> In addition, we collected
+  two more specimens of the Neuman's hartebeeste, and two Chanler's
+  reed buck.</P>
+
+  <P>But Mavrouki's glowing predictions as to roan were hardly
+  borne out by facts. According to him the mountains simply swarmed
+  with them&mdash;he had seen thirty-five in one day, etc. Of
+  course we had discounted this, but some old tracks had to a
+  certain extent borne out his statement.</P>
+
+  <P>Lunch time one day, however, found us on top of the highest
+  ridge. Here we hunted up a bit of shade, and spent two hours out
+  of the noon sun. While we lay there the sky slowly overcast, so
+  that when we aroused ourselves to go on, the dazzling light had
+  softened. As time was getting short, we decided to separate.
+  Memba Sasa and Mavrouki were to go in one direction, while C.,
+  Kongoni and I took the other.</P>
+
+  <P>Before we started I remarked that I was offering two rupees
+  for the capture of a roan.</P>
+
+  <P>We had not gone ten minutes when Kongoni turned his head
+  cautiously and grinned back at us.</P>
+
+  <P>"My rupees," said he.</P>
+
+  <P>A fine buck roan stood motionless beneath a tree in the valley
+  below us. He was on the other side of the stream jungle, and
+  nearly a mile away. While we watched him, he lay down.</P>
+
+  <P>Our task now was to gain the shelter of the stream jungle
+  below without being seen, to slip along it until opposite the
+  roan, and then to penetrate the jungle near enough to get a shot.
+  The first part of this contract seemed to us the most difficult,
+  for we were forced to descend the face of the hill, like flies
+  crawling down a blackboard, plain for him to see.</P>
+
+  <P>We slid cautiously from bush to bush; we moved by
+  imperceptible inches across the numerous open spaces. About
+  half-way down we were arrested by a violent snort ahead. Fifteen
+  or twenty zebras nooning in the brush where no zebras were
+  supposed to be, clattered down the hill like an avalanche. We
+  froze where we were. The beasts ran fifty yards, then wheeled,
+  and started back up the hill, trying to make us out. For twenty
+  minutes all parties to the transaction remained stock still, the
+  zebras staring, we hoping fervently they would decide to go down
+  the valley and not up it, the roan dozing under his distant
+  tree.</P>
+
+  <P>By luck our hopes were fulfilled. The zebra turned downstream,
+  walking sedately away in single file. When we were certain they
+  had all quite gone, we resumed our painful descent.</P>
+
+  <P>At length we dropped below the screen of trees, and could
+  stand upright and straighten the kinks out of our backs. But now
+  a new complication arose. The wind, which had been the very basis
+  of our calculations, commenced to chop and veer. Here it blew
+  from one quarter, up there on the side hill from another, and
+  through the bushes in quite another direction still. Then without
+  warning they would all shift about. We watched the tops of the
+  grasses through our binoculars, hoping to read some logic into
+  the condition. It was now four o'clock&mdash;our stalk had thus
+  far consumed two hours&mdash;and the roan must soon begin to
+  feed. If we were going to do anything, we must do it soon.</P>
+
+  <P>Therefore we crept through a very spiky, noisy jungle to its
+  other edge, sneaked along the edge until we could make out the
+  tree, and raised ourselves for a look. Through the glass I could
+  just make out the roan's face stripe. He was still there!</P>
+
+  <P>Quite encouraged, I instantly dropped down and crawled to
+  within range. When again I raised my head the roan had
+  disappeared. One of these aggravating little side puffs of breeze
+  had destroyed our two hours' work.</P>
+
+  <P>The outlook was not particularly encouraging. We had no means
+  of telling how far the animal would go, nor into what sort of
+  country; and the hour was well advanced toward sunset. However,
+  we took up the track, and proceeded to follow it as well as we
+  could. That was not easy, for the ground was hard and stony.
+  Suddenly C. threw himself flat. Of course we followed his
+  example. To us he whispered that he thought he had caught a
+  glimpse of the animal through an opening and across the stream
+  bed. We stalked carefully, and found ourselves in the middle of a
+  small herd of topis, one of which, half concealed in the brush,
+  had deceived C. This consumed valuable time. When again we had
+  picked up the spoor, it was agreed that I was to still-hunt ahead
+  as rapidly as I could, while C. and Kongoni would puzzle out the
+  tracks as far as possible before dark.</P>
+
+  <P>Therefore I climbed the little rocky ridge on our left, and
+  walked along near its crest, keeping a sharp lookout over the
+  valley below&mdash;much as one would hunt August bucks in
+  California. After two or three hundred yards I chanced on a short
+  strip of soft earth in which the fresh tracks of the roan going
+  uphill were clearly imprinted. I could not without making too
+  much noise inform the others that I had cut in ahead of them; so
+  I followed the tracks as cautiously and quietly as I could. On
+  the very top of the hill the roan leapt from cover fifty yards
+  away, and with a clatter of rocks dashed off down the ridge. The
+  grass was very high, and I could see only his head and horns, but
+  I dropped the front sight six inches and let drive at a guess.
+  The guess happened to be a good one, for he turned a somersault
+  seventy-two yards away.</P>
+
+  <P>C. and Kongoni came up. The sun had just set. In fifteen
+  minutes it would be pitch dark. We dispatched Kongoni for help
+  and lanterns, and turned to on the job of building a signal fire
+  and skinning the trophy.</P>
+
+  <P>The reason for our strangely chopping wind now became
+  apparent. From our elevation we could see piled thunder-clouds
+  looming up from the west. They were spreading upward and outward
+  in the swift, rushing manner of tropic storms; and I saw I must
+  hustle if I was to get my fire going at all. The first little
+  blaze was easy, and after that I had to pile on quantities of any
+  wood I could lay my hands to. The deluge blotted out every
+  vestige of daylight and nearly drowned out my fire. I had started
+  to help C. with the roan, but soon found that I had my own job
+  cut out for me, and so went back to nursing my blaze. The water
+  descended in sheets. We were immediately soaked through, and very
+  cold. The surface of the ground was steep and covered with loose
+  round rocks, and in my continuous trips for firewood I stumbled
+  and slipped and ran into thorns miserably.<A name=
+  'FNanchor_30_30' id="FNanchor_30_30"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_30_30'><SUP>[30]</SUP></A></P>
+
+  <P>After a long interval of this the lanterns came bobbing
+  through the darkness, and a few moments later the dim light
+  revealed the shining rain-soaked faces of our men.</P>
+
+  <P>We wasted no time in the distribution of burdens. C. with one
+  of the lanterns brought up the rear, while I with the other went
+  on ahead.</P>
+
+  <P>Now as Kongoni had but this minute completed the round trip to
+  camp, we concluded that he would be the best one to give us a
+  lead. This was a mistake. He took us out of the hills well
+  enough, and a good job that was, for we could not see the length
+  of our arms into the thick, rainy blackness, and we had to go
+  entirely by the slants of the country. But once in the more open,
+  sloping country, with its innumerable bushy or wooded ravines, he
+  began to stray. I felt this from the first; but Kongoni insisted
+  strongly he was right, and in the rain and darkness we had no way
+  of proving him wrong. In fact I had no reason for thinking him
+  wrong; I only felt it. This sense of direction is apparently a
+  fifth wheel or extra adjustment some people happen to possess. It
+  has nothing to do with acquired knowledge, as is very well proved
+  by the fact that in my own case it acts only as long as I do not
+  think about it. As soon as I begin consciously to consider the
+  matter I am likely to go wrong. Thus many, many times I have
+  back-tracked in the dark over ground I had traversed but once
+  before, and have caught myself turning out for bushes or trees I
+  could not see, but which my subconscious memory recalled. This
+  would happen only when I would think of something besides the way
+  home. As soon as I took charge, I groped as badly as the next
+  man. It is a curious and sometimes valuable extra, but by no
+  means to be depended upon.</P>
+
+  <P>Now, however, as I was following Kongoni, this faculty had
+  full play, and it assured me vehemently that we were wrong. I
+  called C. up from the rear for consultation. Kongoni was very
+  positive he was right; but as we had now been walking over an
+  hour, and camp should not have been more than three miles from
+  where we had killed the roan, we were inclined towards my
+  instinct. So we took the compass direction, in order to assure
+  consistency at least, and struck off at full right angles to the
+  left.</P>
+
+  <P>So we tramped for a long time. Every few moments Kongoni would
+  want another look at that compass. It happened that we were now
+  going due north, and his notion was that the needle pointed the
+  way to camp. We profoundly hoped that his faith in white man's
+  magic would not be shattered. At the end of an hour the rain let
+  up, and it cleared sufficiently to disclose some of the mountain
+  outlines. They convinced us that we were in the main right;
+  though just where, to the north, camp now lay was beyond our
+  power to determine. Kongoni's detour had been rather
+  indeterminate in direction and distance.</P>
+
+  <P>The country now became very rough, in a small way. The feeble
+  light of our leading lantern revealed only ghosts and phantoms
+  and looming, warning suggestions of things which the shadows
+  confused and shifted. Heavily laden men would have found it
+  difficult travelling by prosaic daylight; but now, with the added
+  impossibility of picking a route ahead, we found ourselves in all
+  sorts of trouble. Many times we had to back out and try again.
+  The ghostly flickering tree shapes against the fathomless black
+  offered us apparently endless aisles that nevertheless closed
+  before us like the doors of a trap when we attempted to enter
+  them.</P>
+
+  <P>We kept doggedly to the same general northerly direction. When
+  you are lost, nothing is more foolish than to make up your mind
+  hastily and without due reflection; and nothing is more foolish
+  than to change your mind once you have made it up. That way
+  vacillation, confusion, and disaster lie. Should you decide,
+  after due consideration of all the elements of the problem, that
+  you should go east, then east you go, and nothing must turn you.
+  You may get to the Atlantic Ocean if nothing else. And if you
+  begin to modify your original plan, then you begin to circle.
+  Believe me; I know.</P>
+
+  <P>Kongoni was plainly sceptical, and said so until I shut him up
+  with some rather peremptory sarcasm. The bearers, who had to
+  stumble in the dark under heavy burdens, were good-natured and
+  joking. This we appreciated. One can never tell whether or not he
+  is popular with a native until he and the native are caught in a
+  dangerous or disagreeable fix.</P>
+
+  <P>We walked two hours as in a treadmill. Then that invaluable
+  though erratic sixth sense of mine awoke. I stopped short.</P>
+
+  <P>"I believe we've come far enough," I shouted back to C., and
+  fired my rifle.</P>
+
+  <P>We received an almost immediate answer from a short distance
+  to the left. Not over two hundred yards in that direction we met
+  our camp men bearing torches, and so were escorted in triumph
+  after a sixteen-hour day.</P>
+
+  <P>FOOTNOTES:</P><A name='Footnote_29_29' id=
+  "Footnote_29_29"></A><A href='#FNanchor_29_29'>[29]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>"The Land of Footprints."</P>
+  </DIV><A name='Footnote_30_30' id="Footnote_30_30"></A><A href=
+  '#FNanchor_30_30'>[30]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>Six months after I had reached home, one of these thorns
+    worked its way out of the calf of my leg.</P>
+  </DIV>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XLVI' id="XLVI"></A>
+
+  <H2>XLVI.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE GREATER KUDU.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>Next morning, in a joking manner, I tried to impress Kongoni
+  with a sense of delinquency in not knowing better his directions,
+  especially as he had twice traversed the route. He declined to be
+  impressed.</P>
+
+  <P>"It is not the business of man to walk at night," he replied
+  with dignity.</P>
+
+  <P>And when you stop to think of it, it certainly is not&mdash;in
+  Africa.</P>
+
+  <P>At this camp we lingered several days. The great prize of our
+  journeying was still lacking, and, to tell the truth, we had
+  about given up hope, if not our efforts. Almost we had begun to
+  believe our friends in Nairobi who had scoffed at the uselessness
+  of our quest. Always we conscientiously looked over good kudu
+  country, hundreds of miles of it, and always with the same lack
+  of result, or even of encouragement. Other game we saw in plenty,
+  of a dozen different varieties, large and small; but our five
+  weeks' search had thus far yielded us only the sight of the same
+  old, old sign, made many months before. If you had stood with us
+  atop one of the mountains, and with us had looked abroad on the
+  countless leagues of rolling brush-clothed land, undulating away
+  in all directions over a far horizon, you must with us have
+  estimated as very slight the chances of happening on the exact
+  pin point where the kudu at that moment happened to be feeding.
+  For the beast is shy, it inhabits the densest, closest mountain
+  cover, it possesses the keen eyesight and sense of smell of the
+  bush-dwelling deer and antelope, and more than the average sense
+  of hearing. There are very few of him. But the chief
+  discouragement is that arising from his roaming tendencies. Other
+  rare animals are apt to "use" about one locality, so that once
+  the hunter finds tracks, new or old, his game is one of patient,
+  skilful search. The greater kudu, however, seems in this country
+  at least to be a wanderer. He is here to-day and gone to-morrow.
+  Systematic search seems as foolish as in the case of the
+  proverbial needle in the haystack. The only method is to sift
+  constantly, and trust to luck. One cannot catch fish with the fly
+  in the book, but one has at least a chance if one keeps it on the
+  water.</P>
+
+  <P>Mavrouki was the only one among us who had the living faith
+  that comes from having seen the animal in the flesh. That is a
+  curious bit of hunter psychology. When a man is out after a
+  species new to him, it is only by the utmost stretch of the
+  imagination that he is able to realize that such an animal can
+  exist at all. He cannot prefigure it, somehow. He generally
+  exaggerates to himself the difficulty of making it out, of
+  approaching it, of getting his shot; until at last, if he happens
+  to have hunted some time in vain, the beast becomes almost
+  mythical and unbelievable. Once he has seen the animal, whether
+  he gets a shot or not, all this vanishes. The strain on faith
+  relaxes. He knows what to look for, and what to expect; and even
+  if he sees no other specimen for a month, he nevertheless goes
+  about the business with a certain confidence.</P>
+
+  <P>One afternoon we had been hunting carefully certain low
+  mountains, and were headed for camp, walking rather carelessly
+  along the bed of a narrow, open valley below the bush-covered
+  side hills. The sun had disappeared behind the ranges, and the
+  dusk of evening was just beginning to rise like a mist from the
+  deeps of the ca&ntilde;ons. We had ceased hunting&mdash;it was
+  time to hurry home&mdash;and happened not to be talking only
+  because we were tired. By sheerest idle luck I chanced to look up
+  to the densely covered face of the mountain. Across a single tiny
+  opening in the tall brush five or six hundred yards away, I
+  caught a movement. Still idly I lifted my glasses for a look at
+  what I thought would prove the usual impalla or sing-sing, and
+  was just in time to catch the spirals of a magnificent set of
+  horns. It was the greater kudu at last!</P>
+
+  <P>I gave a little cluck of caution; and instantly, without
+  question, after the African fashion, the three men ahead of me
+  sank to the ground. C. looked at me inquiringly. I motioned with
+  my eyes. He raised his glasses for one look.</P>
+
+  <P>"That's the fellow," he said quietly.</P>
+
+  <P>The kudu, as though he had merely stepped into the opening to
+  give us a sight of him, melted into the brush.</P>
+
+  <P>It was magnificent and exciting to have seen this wonderful
+  beast after so long a quest, but by the same token it was not
+  very encouraging for all that. If we had had all the daylight we
+  needed, and unlimited time, it would have been quite a feat to
+  stalk the wary beast in that thick, noisy cover. Now it was
+  almost dark, and would be quite dark within the half-hour. The
+  kudu had moved out of sight. Whether he had gone on some
+  distance, or whether he still lingered near the edge of the tiny
+  opening was another matter to be determined, and to be determined
+  quickly.</P>
+
+  <P>Leaving Kongoni and Mavrouki, C. and I wriggled pantingly up
+  the hill, as fast and at the same time as cautiously as we could.
+  At the edge of the opening we came to a halt, belly down, and
+  began eagerly to scrutinize the brush across the way. If the kudu
+  still lingered we had to find it out before we ventured out of
+  cover to take up his trail. Inch by inch we scrutinized every
+  possible concealment. Finally C. breathed sharp with
+  satisfaction. He had caught sight of the tip of one horn. With
+  some difficulty he indicated to me where. After staring long
+  enough, we could dimly make out the kudu himself browsing, from
+  the tender branch-ends.</P>
+
+  <P>All we could do was to lie low. If the kudu fed on out of
+  sight into the cover, we could not possibly get a shot; if he
+  should happen again to cross the opening, we would get a good
+  shot. No one but a hunter can understand the panting, dry-mouthed
+  excitement of those minutes; five weeks' hard work hung in the
+  balance. The kudu did neither of these things; he ceased
+  browsing, took three steps forward, and stood.</P>
+
+  <P>The game seemed blocked. The kudu had evidently settled down
+  for a snooze; it was impossible, in the situation, to shorten the
+  distance without being discovered; the daylight was almost gone;
+  we could make out no trace of him except through our glasses.
+  Look as hard as we could, we could see nothing with the naked
+  eye. Unless something happened within the next two minutes, we
+  would bring nothing into camp but the memory of a magnificent
+  beast. And next day he would probably be inextricably lost in the
+  wilderness of mountains.<A name='FNanchor_31_31' id=
+  "FNanchor_31_31"></A><A href=
+  '#Footnote_31_31'><SUP>[31]</SUP></A></P>
+
+  <P>It was a time for desperate measures, and, to C.'s evident
+  doubtful anxiety, I took them. Through the glasses the mane of
+  the kudu showed as a dim gray streak. Carefully I picked out two
+  twigs on a bush fifteen feet from me, and a tuft of grass ten
+  yards on, all of which were in line with where the shoulder of
+  the kudu ought to be. Then I lowered my glasses. The gray streak
+  of the kudu's mane had disappeared in the blending twilight, but
+  I could still see the tips of the twigs and the tuft of grass.
+  Very carefully I aligned the sights with these; and, with a
+  silent prayer to the Red Gods, loosed the bullet into the
+  darkness.</P>
+
+  <P>At the crack of the rifle the kudu leapt into plain sight.</P>
+
+  <P>"Hit!" rasped C. in great excitement.</P>
+
+  <P>I did not wait to verify this, but fired four times more as
+  fast as I could work the bolt. Three of the bullets told. At the
+  last shot he crumpled and came rolling down the slope. We both
+  raised a wild whoop of triumph, which was answered at once by the
+  expectant gunbearers below.</P>
+
+  <P>The finest trophy in Africa was ours!</P>
+
+  <P>FOOTNOTES:</P><A name='Footnote_31_31' id=
+  "Footnote_31_31"></A><A href='#FNanchor_31_31'>[31]</A>
+
+  <DIV class='note'>
+    <P>Trailing for any distance was impossible on account of the
+    stony soil.</P>
+  </DIV>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XLVII' id="XLVII"></A>
+
+  <H2>XLVII.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE MAGIC PORTALS CLOSE.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>It seemed hopeless to try for a picture. Nevertheless I opened
+  wide my lens, steadied the camera, and gave it a half-second. The
+  result was fairly good. So much for a high grade lens. We sent
+  Kongoni into camp for help, and ourselves proceeded to build up
+  the usual fire for signal and for protection against wild beasts.
+  Then we sat down to enjoy the evening, while Mavrouki skinned the
+  kudu.</P>
+
+  <P>We looked abroad over a wide stretch of country. Successive
+  low ridges crossed our front, each of a different shade of slate
+  gray from its neighbours, and a gray half-luminous mist filled
+  the valley between them. The edge of the world was thrown sharp
+  against burnished copper. After a time the moon rose.</P>
+
+  <P>Memba Sasa arrived before the lanterns, out of breath, his
+  face streaming with perspiration. Poor Memba Sasa! this was
+  almost the only day he had not followed close at my heels, and on
+  this day we had captured the Great Prize. No thought of that
+  seemed to affect the heartiness of his joy. He rushed up to shake
+  both my hands; he examined the kudu with an attention that was
+  held only by great restraint; he let go that restrain to shake me
+  again enthusiastically by the hands. After him, up the hill,
+  bobbed slowly the lanterns. The smiling bearers shouldered the
+  trophy and the meat, and we stumbled home through the half
+  shadows and the opalescences of the moonlight.</P>
+
+  <P>Our task in this part of the country was now finished. We set
+  out on the return journey. The weather changed. A beautiful,
+  bright-copper sunset was followed by a drizzle. By morning this
+  had turned into a heavy rain. We left the topi camp, to which we
+  had by now returned, cold and miserable. C. and I had contributed
+  our waterproofs to protect the precious trophies, and we were
+  speedily wet through. The grass was long. This was no warm and
+  grateful tropical rain, but a driving, chilling storm straight
+  out from the high mountains.</P>
+
+  <P>We marched up the long plain, we turned to the left around the
+  base of the ranges, we mounted the narrow grass valley, we
+  entered the forest&mdash;the dark, dripping, and unfriendly
+  forest. Over the edge we dropped and clambered down through the
+  hanging vines and the sombre trees. By-and-by, we emerged on the
+  open plains below, the plains on the hither side of the
+  Narossara, the Africa we had known so long. The rain ceased. It
+  was almost as though a magic portal had clicked after us. Behind
+  it lay the wonderful secret upper country of the unknown.</P>
+  <HR style='width: 65%;'>
+  <A name='XLVIII' id="XLVIII"></A>
+
+  <H2>XLVIII.</H2>
+
+  <P>THE LAST TREK.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>Some weeks later we camped high on the slopes of Suswa, the
+  great mountain of the Rift Valley, only one day's march from the
+  railroad. After the capture of the kudu Africa still held for us
+  various adventures&mdash;a buffalo, a go of fever, and the
+  like&mdash;but the culmination had been reached. We had lingered
+  until the latest moment, reluctant to go. Now in the gray dawn we
+  were filing down the slopes of the mountains for the last trek. A
+  low, flowing mist marked the distant Kedong; the flames of an
+  African sunrise were revelling in the eastern skies. All our old
+  friends seemed to be bidding us good-bye. Around the shoulder of
+  the mountains a lion roared, rumble upon rumble. Two hyenas leapt
+  from the grass, ran fifty yards, and turned to look at us.</P>
+
+  <P>"Good-bye, simba! good-bye, fice!" we cried to them sadly.</P>
+
+  <P>A little farther we saw zebra, and the hartebeeste, and the
+  gazelles. One by one appeared and disappeared again the beasts
+  with which we had grown so familiar during our long months in the
+  jungle. So remarkable was the number of species that we both
+  began to comment upon the fact, to greet the animals, to bid them
+  farewell, as though they were reporting in order from the jungle
+  to bid us God-speed. Half in earnest we waved our hands to them
+  and shouted our greetings to them in the native&mdash;punda
+  milia, kongoni, pa-a, fice, m'pofu, twiga, simba, n'grooui, and
+  the rest. Before our eyes the misty ranges hardened and stiffened
+  under the fierce sun. Our men marched steadily, cheerfully,
+  beating their loads in rhythm with their safari sticks, crooning
+  under their breaths, and occasionally breaking into full-voiced
+  chant. They were glad to be back from the long safari, back from
+  across the Thirst, from the high, cold country, from the dangers
+  and discomforts of the unknown. We rode a little wistfully, for
+  these great plains and mysterious jungles, these populous,
+  dangerous, many-voiced nights, these flaming, splendid dawnings
+  and day-falls, these fierce, shimmering noons we were to know no
+  more.</P>
+
+  <P>Two days we had in Nairobi before going to the coast. There we
+  paid off and dismissed our men, giving them presents according to
+  the length and faithfulness of their service. They took them and
+  departed, eagerly, as was natural, to the families and the
+  pleasures from which they had been so long separated. Mohammed
+  said good-bye, and went, and was sorry; Kongoni departed, after
+  many and sincere protestations; quiet little Mavrouki came back
+  three times to shake hands again, and disappeared
+  reluctantly&mdash;but disappeared; Leyeye went; Abba Ali followed
+  the service of his master, C.; "Timothy" received his
+  present&mdash;in which he was disappointed&mdash;and departed
+  with salaams. Only Memba Sasa remained. I paid him for his long
+  service, and I gave him many and rich presents, and bade farewell
+  to him with genuine regret and affection.</P>
+
+  <P>Memba Sasa had wives and a farm near town, neither of which
+  possessions he had seen for a very long while. Nevertheless he
+  made no move to see them. When our final interview had terminated
+  with the usual "Bags" (It is finished), he shook hands once more
+  and withdrew, but only to take his position across the street.
+  There he squatted on his heels, fixed his eyes upon me, and
+  remained. I went down town on business. Happening to glance
+  through the office window I caught sight of Memba Sasa again
+  across the street, squatted on his heels, his gaze fixed
+  unwaveringly on my face. So it was for two days. When I tried to
+  approach him, he glided away, so that I got no further speech
+  with him; but always, quietly and unobtrusively, he returned to
+  where he could see me plainly. He considered that our interview
+  had terminated our official relations, but he wanted to see the
+  last of the bwana with whom he had journeyed so far.</P>
+
+  <P>One makes many acquaintances as one knocks about the world;
+  and once in a great many moons one finds a friend&mdash;a man the
+  mere fact of whose existence one is glad to realize, whether one
+  ever sees him again or not. These are not many, and they are of
+  various degree. Among them I am glad to number this fierce
+  savage. He was efficient, self-respecting, brave, staunch, and
+  loyal with a great loyalty. I do not think I can better end this
+  book than by this feeble tribute to a man whose opportunities
+  were not many, but whose soul was great.</P><BR>
+
+  <P>THE END</P>
+
+  <H3>BOOKS BY STEWART EDWARD WHITE.</H3>
+
+  <P><SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>"<I>Mr. Stewart Edward White
+  is a Thomas Hardy, so to</I></SPAN><BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'><I>speak, of the primeval
+  forests of the Far West, and of the</I></SPAN><BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'><I>great rivers that run out of
+  them over the brink of evening.</I></SPAN><BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'><I>His large, still novels will
+  live on as a kind of social</I></SPAN><BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>history."&mdash;<I>The Morning
+  Post</I>.</SPAN><BR>
+  <BR>
+  <BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>THE LAND OF FOOTPRINTS&nbsp;
+  2s. net.</SPAN><BR>
+  <BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>"The best book of travel in
+  Africa that has been published for</SPAN><BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>many years."&mdash;<I>The
+  Nottingham Daily Express</I>.</SPAN><BR>
+  <BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>"It is more than a thrilling
+  story of adventure, for Mr. White</SPAN><BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>shows that he is a man of broad
+  sympathies and understanding, and</SPAN><BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>can not only deal successfully
+  with primitive tribes, but really knows</SPAN><BR>
+  <SPAN style=
+  'margin-left: 2.5em;'>them."&mdash;<I>Punch</I>.</SPAN><BR>
+  <BR>
+  <BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>THE CABIN&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
+  &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 2s. net.</SPAN><BR>
+  <BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>"'The Cabin' is a pure delight.
+  We read of a husband and wife</SPAN><BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>camping out in a little shanty
+  in the heart of a Californian</SPAN><BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>forest&mdash;that is all the
+  story; but around it grows chapter after</SPAN><BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>chapter of&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
+  sagacity and fun and insight, and a deep joy in</SPAN><BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>beauty and living things. And
+  all is given to us as simply and</SPAN><BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>sincerely as it was lived
+  through and thought through."</SPAN><BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>&mdash;<I>The
+  Nation</I>.</SPAN><BR>
+  <BR>
+  <BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>THE FOREST&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
+  &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 1s. net.</SPAN><BR>
+  <BR>
+  <BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>RULES OF THE GAME&nbsp; &nbsp;
+  &nbsp; 7d. net.</SPAN><BR>
+  <BR>
+  <BR>
+  <SPAN style='margin-left: 2.5em;'>THE BLAZED TRAIL&nbsp; &nbsp;
+  &nbsp; &nbsp; 7d. net.</SPAN><BR></P>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's African Camp Fires, by Stewart Edward White
+
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+</pre>
+
+</BODY>
+</HTML>
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@@ -0,0 +1,8440 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of African Camp Fires, by Stewart Edward White
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: African Camp Fires
+
+Author: Stewart Edward White
+
+Release Date: December 24, 2004 [EBook #14451]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AFRICAN CAMP FIRES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Steven Gibbs and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+AFRICAN CAMP FIRES
+
+BY
+
+STEWART EDWARD WHITE
+
+     THOMAS NELSON AND SONS
+     LONDON, EDINBURGH, DUBLIN
+     AND NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+     PART I.--TO THE ISLAND OF WAR.
+
+     I. THE OPEN DOOR
+
+     II. THE FAREWELL
+
+     III. PORT SAID
+
+     IV. SUEZ
+
+     V. THE RED SEA
+
+     VI. ADEN
+
+     VII. THE INDIAN OCEAN
+
+     VIII. MOMBASA
+
+
+     PART II.--THE SHIMBA HILLS.
+
+     IX. A TROPICAL JUNGLE
+
+     X. THE SABLE
+
+     XI. A MARCH ALONG THE COAST
+
+     XII. THE FIRE
+
+
+     PART III.--NAIROBI.
+
+     XIII. UP FROM THE COAST
+
+     XIV. A TOWN OF CONTRASTS
+
+     XV. PEOPLE
+
+     XVI. RECRUITING
+
+
+     PART IV.--A LION HUNT ON KAPITI.
+
+     XVII. AN OSTRICH FARM AT MACHAKOS
+
+     XVIII. THE FIRST LIONESS
+
+     XIX. THE DOGS
+
+     XX. BONDONI
+
+     XXI. RIDING THE PLAINS
+
+     XXII. THE SECOND LIONESS
+
+     XXIII. THE BIG LION
+
+     XXIV. THE FIFTEEN LIONS
+
+
+     PART V.--THE TSAVO RIVER.
+
+     XXV. VOI
+
+     XXVI. THE FRINGE-EARED ORYX
+
+     XXVII. ACROSS THE SERENGETTI
+
+     XXVIII. DOWN THE RIVER
+
+     XXIX. THE LESSER KUDU
+
+     XXX. ADVENTURES BY THE WAY
+
+     XXXI. THE LOST SAFARI
+
+     XXXII. THE BABU
+
+
+     PART VI.--IN MASAILAND.
+
+     XXXIII. OVER THE LIKIPIA ESCARPMENT
+
+     XXXIV. TO THE KEDONG
+
+     XXXV. THE TEANSPORT RIDER
+
+     XXXVI. ACROSS THE THIRST
+
+     XXXVII. THE SOUTHERN GUASO NYERO
+
+     XXXVIII. THE LOWER BENCHES
+
+     XXXIX. NOTES ON THE MASAI
+
+     XL. THROUGH THE ENCHANTED FOREST
+
+     XLI. NAIOKOTUKU
+
+     XLII. SCOUTING IN THE ELEPHANT FOREST
+
+     XLIII. THE TOPI CAMP
+
+     XLIV. THE UNKNOWN LAND
+
+     XLV. THE ROAN
+
+     XLVI. THE GREATER KUDU
+
+     XLVII. THE MAGIC PORTALS CLOSE
+
+     XLVIII. THE LAST TREK
+
+
+
+
+PART I.
+
+
+TO THE ISLAND OF WAR.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+THE OPEN DOOR.
+
+
+There are many interesting hotels scattered about the world, with a few
+of which I am acquainted and with a great many of which I am not. Of
+course all hotels are interesting, from one point of view or another. In
+fact, the surest way to fix an audience's attention is to introduce your
+hero, or to display your opening chorus in the lobby or along the facade
+of a hotel. The life, the movement and colour, the drifting
+individualities, the pretence, the bluff, the self-consciousness, the
+independence, the _ennui_, the darting or lounging servants, the very
+fact that of those before your eyes seven out of ten are drawn from
+distant and scattered places, are sufficient in themselves to invest the
+smallest hostelry with glamour. It is not of this general interest that
+I would now speak. Nor is it my intention at present to glance at the
+hotels wherein "quaintness" is specialized, whether intentionally or no.
+There are thousands of them; and all of them well worth the
+discriminating traveller's attention. Concerning some of them--as the
+old inns at Dives-sur-Mer and at Mont St. Michel--whole books have been
+written. These depend for their charm on a mingled gift of the unusual
+and the picturesque. There are, as I have said, thousands of them; and
+of their cataloguing, should one embark on so wide a sea, there could be
+no end. And, again, I must for convenience exclude the altogether
+charming places, like the Tour d'Argent of Paris, Simpson's of the
+Strand,[1] and a dozen others that will spring to every traveller's
+memory, where the personality of the host, or of a chef, or even a
+waiter, is at once a magnet for the attraction of visitors and a reward
+for their coming. These, too, are many. In the interest to which I would
+draw attention, the hotel as a building or as an institution has little
+part. It is indeed a facade, a _mise en scene_before which play the
+actors that attract our attention and applause. The set may be as
+modernly elaborate as Peacock Alley of the Waldorf or the templed lobby
+of the St. Francis; or it may present the severe and Elizabethan
+simplicity of the stone-paved veranda of the Norfolk at Nairobi--the
+matter is quite inessential to the spectator. His appreciation is only
+slightly and indirectly influenced by these things. Sunk in his
+arm-chair--of velvet or of canvas--he puffs hard and silently at his
+cigar, watching and listening as the pageant and the conversation eddy
+by.
+
+Of such hotels I number that gaudy and polysyllabic hostelry the Grand
+Hotel du Louvre et de la Paix at Marseilles. I am indifferent to the
+facts that it is situated on that fine thoroughfare, the Rue de
+Cannebiere, which the proud and untravelled native devoutly believes to
+be the finest street in the world; that it possesses a dining-room of
+gilded and painted _repousse_ work so elaborate and wonderful that it
+surely must be intended to represent a tinsmith's dream of heaven; that
+its concierge is the most impressive human being on earth except Ludwig
+von Kampf (whom I have never seen); that its head waiter is sadder and
+more elderly and forgiving than any other head waiter; and that its
+hushed and cathedral atmosphere has been undisturbed through immemorial
+years. That is to be expected; and elsewhere to be duplicated in
+greater or lesser degree. Nor in the lofty courtyard, or the equally
+lofty halls and reading-rooms, is there ever much bustle and movement.
+People sit quietly, or move with circumspection. Servants glide. The
+fall of a book or teaspoon, the sudden closing of a door, are events to
+be remarked. Once a day, however, a huge gong sounds, the glass doors of
+the inner courtyard are thrown open with a flourish, and enters the huge
+bus fairly among those peacefully sitting at the tables, horses' hoofs
+striking fire, long lash-cracking volleys, wheels roaring amid hollow
+reverberations. From the interior of this bus emerge people; and from
+the top, by means of a strangely-constructed hooked ladder, are decanted
+boxes, trunks, and appurtenances of various sorts. In these people, and
+in these boxes, trunks, and appurtenances, are the real interest of the
+Grand Hotel du Louvre et de la Paix of the marvellous Rue Cannebiere of
+Marseilles.
+
+For at Marseilles land ships, many ships, from all the scattered ends of
+the earth; and from Marseilles depart trains for the North, where is
+home, or the way home for many peoples. And since the arrival of ships
+is uncertain, and the departure of trains fixed, it follows that
+everybody descends for a little or greater period at the Grand Hotel du
+Louvre et de la Paix.
+
+They come lean and quiet and a little yellow from hard climates, with
+the names of strange places on their lips, and they speak familiarly of
+far-off things. Their clothes are generally of ancient cut, and the
+wrinkles and camphor aroma of a long packing away are yet discernible.
+Often they are still wearing sun helmets or double terai hats, pending a
+descent on a Piccadilly hatter two days hence. They move slowly and
+languidly; the ordinary piercing and dominant English enunciation has
+fallen to modulation; their eyes, while observant and alert, look tired.
+It is as though the far countries have sucked something from the pith of
+them in exchange for great experiences that nevertheless seem of little
+value; as though these men, having met at last face to face the ultimate
+of what the earth has to offer in the way of danger, hardship,
+difficulty, and the things that try men's souls, having unexpectedly
+found them all to fall short of both the importance and the final
+significance with which human-kind has always invested them, were now
+just a little at a loss. Therefore they stretch their long, lean frames
+in the wicker chairs, they sip the long drinks at their elbows, puff
+slowly at their long, lean cheroots, and talk spasmodically in short
+sentences.
+
+Of quite a different type are those going out--young fellows full of
+northern health and energy, full of the eagerness of anticipation, full
+of romance skilfully concealed, self-certain, authoritative, clear
+voiced. Their exit from the bus is followed by a rain of hold-alls,
+bags, new tin boxes, new gun cases, all lettered freshly--an enormous
+kit doomed to diminution. They overflow the place, ebb towards their
+respective rooms; return scrubbed and ruddy, correctly clad, correctly
+unconscious of everybody else; sink into more wicker chairs. The quiet
+brown and yellow men continue to puff at their cheroots, quite eclipsed.
+After a time one of them picks up his battered old sun helmet and goes
+out into the street. The eyes of the newcomers follow him. They fall
+silent; and their eyes, under cover of pulled moustache, furtively
+glance towards the lean man's companions. Then on that office falls a
+great silence, broken only by the occasional rare remarks of the quiet
+men with the cheroots. The youngsters are listening with all their ears,
+though from their appearance no one would suspect that fact. Not a
+syllable escapes them. These quiet men have been there; they have seen
+with their own eyes; their lightest word is saturated with the mystery
+and romance of the unknown. Their easy, matter-of-fact, everyday
+knowledge is richly wonderful. It would seem natural for these
+young-young men to question these old-young men of that which they
+desire so ardently to know; but that isn't done, you know. So they sit
+tight, and pretend they are not listening, and feast their ears on the
+wonderful syllables--Ankobar, Kabul, Peshawur, Annam, Nyassaland,
+Kerman, Serengetti, Tanganika, and many others. On these beautiful
+syllables must their imaginations feed, for that which is told is as
+nothing at all. Adventure there is none, romance there is none, mention
+of high emprise there is none. Adventure, romance, high emprise have to
+these men somehow lost their importance. Perhaps such things have been
+to them too common--as well mention the morning egg. Perhaps they have
+found that there is no genuine adventure, no real romance except over
+the edge of the world where the rainbow stoops.
+
+The bus rattles in and rattles out again. It takes the fresh-faced young
+men down past the inner harbour to where lie the tall ships waiting.
+They and their cargo of exuberance, of hope, of energy, of thirst for
+the bubble adventure, the rainbow romance, sail away to where these
+wares have a market. And the quiet men glide away to the North. Their
+wares have been marketed. The sleepy, fierce, passionate, sunny lands
+have taken all they had to bring. And have given in exchange?
+Indifference, ill-health, a profound realization that the length of days
+are as nothing at all; a supreme agnosticism as to the ultimate value of
+anything that a single man can do, a sublime faith that it must be done,
+the power to concentrate, patience illimitable; contempt for danger,
+disregard of death, the intention to live; a final, weary estimate of
+the fact that mere things are as unimportant here as there, no matter
+how quaintly or fantastically they are dressed or named, and a
+corresponding emptiness of anticipation for the future--these items are
+only a random few of the price given by the ancient lands for that which
+the northern races bring to them. What other alchemical changes have
+been wrought only these lean and weary men could know--if they dared
+look so far within themselves. And even if they dared, they would not
+tell.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] In old days before the "improvements."
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+THE FAREWELL.
+
+
+We boarded ship, filled with a great, and what seemed to us, an
+unappeasable curiosity as to what we were going to see. It was not a
+very big ship, in spite of the grandiloquent descriptions in the
+advertisements, or the lithograph wherein she cut grandly and evenly
+through huge waves to the manifest discomfiture of infinitesimal sailing
+craft bobbing alongside. She was manned entirely by Germans. The room
+stewards waited at table, cleaned the public saloons, kept the library,
+rustled the baggage, and played in the band. That is why we took our
+music between meals. Our staterooms were very tiny indeed. Each was
+provided with an electric fan; a totally inadequate and rather
+aggravating electric fan once we had entered the Red Sea. Just at this
+moment we paid it little attention, for we were still in full enjoyment
+of sunny France, where, in our own experience, it had rained two months
+steadily. Indeed, at this moment it was raining, raining a steady, cold,
+sodden drizzle that had not even the grace to pick out the surface of
+the harbour in the jolly dancing staccato that goes far to lend
+attraction to a genuinely earnest rainstorm.
+
+Down the long quay splashed cabs and omnibuses, their drivers glistening
+in wet capes, to discharge under the open shed at the end various hasty
+individuals who marshalled long lines of porters with astonishing
+impedimenta and drove them up the gang-plank. A half-dozen roughs
+lounged aimlessly. A little bent old woman with a shawl over her head
+searched here and there. Occasionally she would find a twisted splinter
+of wood torn from the piles by a hawser or gouged from the planking by
+heavy freight, or kicked from the floor by the hoofs of horses. This she
+deposited carefully in a small covered market basket. She was entirely
+intent on this minute and rather pathetic task, quite unattending the
+greatness of the ship, or the many people the great hulk swallowed or
+spat forth.
+
+Near us against the rail leaned a dark-haired young Englishman whom
+later every man on that many-nationed ship came to recognize and to
+avoid as an insufferable bore. Now, however, the angel of good
+inspiration stooped to him. He tossed a copper two-sou piece down to the
+bent old woman. She heard the clink of the fall, and looked up
+bewildered. One of the waterside roughs slouched forward. The Englishman
+shouted a warning and a threat, indicating in pantomime for whom the
+coin was intended. To our surprise that evil-looking wharf rat smiled
+and waved his hand reassuringly, then took the old woman by the arm to
+show her where the coin had fallen. She hobbled to it with a haste
+eloquent of the horrible Marseillaise poverty-stricken alleys, picked it
+up joyously, turned--and with a delightful grace kissed her finger-tips
+towards the ship.
+
+Apparently we all of us had a few remaining French coins; and certainly
+we were all grateful to the young Englishman for his happy thought. The
+sous descended as fast as the woman could get to where they fell. So
+numerous were they that she had no time to express her gratitude except
+in broken snatches or gesture, in interrupted attitudes of the most
+complete thanksgiving. The day of miracles for her had come; and from
+the humble poverty that valued tiny and infrequent splinters of wood she
+had suddenly come into great wealth. Everybody was laughing, but in a
+very kindly sort of way it seemed to me; and the very wharf rats and
+gamins, wolfish and fierce in their everyday life of the water-front,
+seemed to take a genuine pleasure in pointing out to her the
+resting-place of those her dim old eyes had not seen. Silver pieces
+followed. These were too wonderful. She grew more and more excited,
+until several of the passengers leaning over the rail began to murmur
+warningly, fearing harm. After picking up each of these silver pieces,
+she bowed and gestured very gracefully, waving both hands outward,
+lifting eyes and hands to heaven, kissing her fingers, trying by every
+means in her power to express the dazzling wonder and joy that this
+unexpected marvel was bringing her. When she had done all these things
+many times, she hugged herself ecstatically. A very well-dressed and
+prosperous-looking Frenchman standing near seemed to be a little afraid
+she might hug him. His fear had, perhaps, some grounds, for she shook
+hands with everybody all around, and showed them her wealth in her
+kerchief, explaining eagerly, the tears running down her face.
+
+Now the gang-plank was drawn aboard, and the band struck up the usual
+lively air. At the first notes the old woman executed a few feeble
+little jig steps in sheer exuberance. Then the solemnity of the
+situation sobered her. Her great, wealthy, powerful, kind friends were
+departing on their long voyage over mysterious seas. Again and again,
+very earnestly, she repeated the graceful, slow pantomime--the wave of
+the arms outward, the eyes raised to heaven, the hands clasped finally
+over her head. As the brown strip of water silently widened between us
+it was strangely like a stage scene--the roofed sheds of the quay, the
+motionless groups, the central figure of the old woman depicting
+emotion.
+
+Suddenly she dropped her hands and hobbled away at a great rate,
+disappearing finally into the maze of the street beyond. Concluding that
+she had decided to get quickly home with her great treasure, we
+commended her discretion and gave our attention to other things.
+
+The drizzle fell uninterruptedly. We had edged sidewise the requisite
+distance, and were now gathering headway in our long voyage. The quail
+was beginning to recede and to diminish. Back from the street hastened
+the figure of the little old woman. She carried a large white cloth, of
+which she had evidently been in quest. This she unfolded and waved
+vigorously with both hands. Until we had passed quite from sight she
+stood there signalling her farewell. Long after we were beyond
+distinguishing her figure we could catch the flutter of white. Thus that
+ship's company, embarking each on his Great Adventure, far from home and
+friends, received their farewell, a very genuine farewell, from one poor
+old woman. B. ventured the opinion that it was the best thing we had
+bought with our French money.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+PORT SAID.
+
+
+The time of times to approach Port Said is just at the fall of dusk.
+Then the sea lies in opalescent patches, and the low shores fade away
+into the gathering night. The slanting masts and yards of the dhows
+silhouette against a sky of the deepest translucent green; and the
+heroic statue of De Lesseps, standing for ever at the Gateway he opened,
+points always to the mysterious East.
+
+The rhythmical, accustomed chug of the engines had fallen to quarter
+speed, leaving an uncanny stillness throughout the ship. Silently we
+slipped between the long piers, drew up on the waterside town, seized
+the buoy, and came to rest. All around us lay other ships of all sizes,
+motionless on the inky water. The reflections from their lights seemed
+to be thrust into the depths, like stilts; and the few lights from the
+town reflected shiveringly across. Along the water-front all was dark
+and silent. We caught the loom of buildings; and behind them a dull glow
+as from a fire, and guessed tall minarets, and heard the rising and
+falling of chanting. Numerous small boats hovered near, floating in and
+out of the patches of light we ourselves cast, waiting for permission to
+swarm at the gang-plank for our patronage.
+
+We went ashore, passed through a wicket gate, and across the dark
+buildings to the heart of the town, whence came the dull glow and the
+sounds of people.
+
+Here were two streets running across one another, both brilliantly
+lighted, both thronged, both lined with little shops. In the latter one
+could buy anything, in any language, with any money. In them we saw
+cheap straw hats made in Germany hung side by side with gorgeous and
+beautiful stuffs from the Orient; shoddy European garments and Eastern
+jewels; cheap celluloid combs and curious embroideries. The crowd of
+passers-by in the streets were compounded in the same curiously mixed
+fashion; a few Europeans, generally in white, and then a variety of
+Arabs, Egyptians, Somalis, Berbers, East Indians and the like, each in
+his own gaudy or graceful costume. It speaks well for the accuracy of
+feeling, anyway, of our various "Midways," "Pikes," and the like of our
+world's expositions that the streets of Port Said looked like Midways
+raised to the nth power. Along them we sauntered with a pleasing feeling
+of self-importance. On all sides we were gently and humbly besought--by
+the shopkeepers, by the sidewalk vendors, by would-be guides, by
+fortune-tellers, by jugglers, by magicians; all soft-voiced and
+respectful; all yielding as water to rebuff, but as quick as water to
+glide back again. The vendors were of the colours of the rainbow, and
+were heavily hung with long necklaces of coral or amber, with scarves,
+with strings of silver coins, with sequinned veils and silks, girt with
+many dirks and knives, furnished out in concealed pockets with scarabs,
+bracelets, sandalwood boxes or anything else under the broad canopy of
+heaven one might or might not desire. Their voices were soft and
+pleasing, their eyes had the beseeching quality of a good dog's, their
+anxious and deprecating faces were ready at the slightest encouragement
+to break out into the friendliest and most intimate of smiles. Wherever
+we went we were accompanied by a retinue straight out of the Arabian
+Nights, patiently awaiting the moment when we should tire; should seek
+out the table of a sidewalk cafe; and should, in our relaxed mood, be
+ready to unbend to our royal purchases.
+
+At that moment we were too much interested in the town itself. The tiny
+shops, with their smiling and insinuating Oriental keepers, were
+fascinating in their displays of carved woods, jewellery, perfumes,
+silks, tapestries, silversmiths' work, ostrich feathers, and the like.
+To either side the main street lay long narrow dark alleys, in which
+flared single lights, across which flitted mysterious long-robed
+figures, from which floated stray snatches of music either palpitatingly
+barbaric or ridiculously modern. There the authority of the straight,
+soldierly-looking Soudanese policemen ceased, and it was not safe to
+wander unarmed or alone.
+
+Besides these motley variegations of the East and West, the main feature
+of the town was the street car. It was an open-air structure of spacious
+dimensions, as though benches and a canopy had been erected rather
+haphazard on a small dancing platform. The track is absurdly narrow in
+gauge; and as a consequence the edifice swayed and swung from side to
+side. A single mule was attached to it loosely by about ten feet of
+rope. It was driven by a gaudy ragamuffin in a turban. Various other
+gaudy ragamuffins lounged largely and picturesquely on the widely spaced
+benches. Whence it came or whither it went I do not know. Its orbit
+swung into the main street, turned a corner, and disappeared. Apparently
+Europeans did not patronize this picturesque wreck, but drove elegantly
+but mysteriously in small open cabs conducted by totally incongruous
+turbaned drivers.
+
+We ended finally at an imposing corner hotel, where we dined by an open
+window just above the level of the street. A dozen upturned faces
+besought us silently during the meal. At a glance of even the mildest
+interest a dozen long brown arms thrust the spoils of the East upon our
+consideration. With us sat a large benign Swedish professor whose
+erudition was encyclopaedic, but whose kindly humanity was greater.
+Uttering deep, cavernous chuckles, the professor bargained. A red coral
+necklace for the moment was the matter of interest. The professor
+inspected it carefully, and handed it back.
+
+"I doubt if id iss coral," said he simply.
+
+The present owner of the beads went frantic with rapid-fire proof and
+vociferation. With the swiftness and precision of much repetition he
+fished out a match, struck it, applied the flame to the alleged coral,
+and blew out the match; cast the necklace on the pavement, produced
+mysteriously a small hammer, and with it proceeded frantically to pound
+the beads. Evidently he was accustomed to being doubted, and carried his
+materials for proof around with him. Then, in one motion, the hammer
+disappeared, the beads were snatched up, and again offered, unharmed,
+for inspection.
+
+"Are those good tests for genuineness?" we asked the professor, aside.
+
+"As to that," he replied regretfully, "I do not know. I know of coral
+only that is the hard calcareous skeleton of the marine coelenterate
+polyps; and that this red coral iss called of a sclerobasic group; and
+other facts of the kind; but I do not know if it iss supposed to resist
+impact and heat. Possibly," he ended shrewdly, "it is the common
+imitation which does _not_ resist impact and heat. At any rate they are
+pretty. How much?" he demanded of the vendor, a bright-eyed Egyptian
+waiting patiently until our conference should cease.
+
+"Twenty shillings," he replied promptly.
+
+The professor shook with one of his cavernous chuckles.
+
+"Too much," he observed, and handed the necklace back through the
+window.
+
+The Egyptian would by no means receive it.
+
+"Keep! keep!" he implored, thrusting the mass of red upon the professor
+with both hands. "How much you give?"
+
+"One shilling," announced the professor firmly.
+
+The coral necklace lay on the edge of the table throughout most of our
+leisurely meal. The vendor argued, pleaded, gave it up, disappeared in
+the crowd, returned dramatically after an interval. The professor ate
+calmly, chuckled much, and from time to time repeated firmly the words,
+"One shilling." Finally, at the cheese, he reached out, swept the coral
+into his pocket, and laid down two shillings. The Egyptian deftly
+gathered the coin, smiled cheerfully, and produced a glittering veil, in
+which he tried in vain to enlist Billy's interest.
+
+For coffee and cigars we moved to the terrace outside. Here an orchestra
+played, the peoples of many nations sat at little tables, the peddlers,
+fakirs, jugglers, and fortune-tellers swarmed. A half-dozen postal cards
+seemed sufficient to set a small boy up in trade, and to imbue him with
+all the importance and insistence of a merchant with jewels. Other
+ten-year-old ragamuffins tried to call our attention to some sort of
+sleight-of-hand with poor downy little chickens. Grave, turbaned, and
+polite Indians squatted cross-legged at our feet, begging to give us a
+look into the future by means of the only genuine hall-marked Yogi-ism;
+a troupe of acrobats went energetically and hopefully through quite a
+meritorious performance a few feet away; a deftly triumphant juggler did
+very easily, and directly beneath our watchful eyes, some really
+wonderful tricks. A butterfly-gorgeous swarm of insinuating smiling
+peddlers of small things dangled and spread their wares where they
+thought themselves most sure of attention. Beyond our own little group
+we saw slowly passing in the lighted street outside the portico the
+variegated and picturesque loungers. Across the way a phonograph bawled;
+our stringed orchestra played "The Dollar Princess;" from somewhere over
+in the dark and mysterious alleyways came the regular beating of a
+tom-tom. The magnificent and picturesque town car with its gaudy
+ragamuffins swayed by in train of its diminutive mule.
+
+Suddenly our persistent and amusing _entourage_ vanished in all
+directions. Standing idly at the portico was a very straight, black
+Soudanese. On his head was the usual red fez; his clothing was of trim
+khaki; his knees and feet were bare, with blue puttees between; and
+around his middle was drawn close and smooth a blood-red sash at least a
+foot and a half in breadth. He made a fine upstanding Egyptian figure,
+and was armed with pride, a short sheathed club, and a great scorn. No
+word spoke he, nor command; but merely jerked a thumb towards the
+darkness, and into the darkness our many-hued horde melted away. We were
+left feeling rather lonesome!
+
+Near midnight we sauntered down the street to the quay, whence we were
+rowed to the ship by another turbaned, long-robed figure, who sweetly
+begged just a copper or so "for poor boatman."
+
+We found the ship in the process of coaling, every porthole and doorway
+closed, and heavy canvas hung to protect as far as possible the clean
+decks. Two barges were moored alongside. Two blazing braziers lighted
+them with weird red and flickering flames. In their depths, cast in
+black and red shadows, toiled half-guessed figures; from their depths,
+mounting a single steep plank, came an unbroken procession of natives,
+naked save for a wisp of cloth around the loins. They trod closely on
+each other's heels, carrying each his basket atop his head or on one
+shoulder, mounted a gang-plank, discharged their loads into the side of
+the ship, and descended again to the depths by way of another plank. The
+lights flickered across their dark faces, their gleaming teeth and eyes.
+Somehow the work demanded a heap of screeching, shouting, and
+gesticulation; but somehow also it went forward rapidly. Dozens of
+unattached natives lounged about the gunwales with apparently nothing to
+do but to look picturesque. Shore boats moved into the narrow circle of
+light, drifted to our gangway, and discharged huge crates of vegetables,
+sacks of unknown stuffs, and returning passengers. A vigilant police
+boat hovered near to settle disputes, generally with the blade of an
+oar. For a long time we leaned over the rail watching them, and the
+various reflected lights in the water, and the very clear, unwavering
+stars. Then, the coaling finished, and the portholes once more opened,
+we turned in.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+SUEZ.
+
+
+Some time during the night we must have started, but so gently had we
+slid along it fractional speed that until I raised my head and looked
+out I had not realized the fact. I saw a high sandbank. This glided
+monotonously by until I grew tired of looking at it and got up.
+
+After breakfast, however, I found that the sandbank had various
+attractions all of its own. Three camels laden with stone and in convoy
+of white-clad figures shuffled down the slope at a picturesque angle.
+Two cowled women in black, veiled to the eyes in gauze heavily sewn with
+sequins, barefooted, with massive silver anklets, watched us pass. Hindu
+workmen in turban and loin-cloth furnished a picturesque note, but did
+not seem to be injuring themselves by over-exertion. Naked small boys
+raced us for a short distance. The banks glided by very slowly and very
+evenly, the wash sucked after us like water in a slough after a duck
+boat, and the sky above the yellow sand looked extremely blue.
+
+At short and regular intervals, half-way up the miniature sandhills,
+heavy piles or snubbing-posts had been planted. For these we at first
+could guess no reason. Soon, however, we had to pass another ship; and
+then we saw that one of us must tie up to avoid being drawn irresistibly
+by suction into collision with the other. The craft sidled by, separated
+by only a few feet, so that we could look across to each other's decks
+and exchange greetings. As the day grew this interest grew likewise.
+Dredgers in the canal; rusty tramps flying unfamiliar flags of strange
+tiny countries; big freighters, often with Greek or Turkish characters
+on their sterns; small dirty steamers of suspicious business; passenger
+ships like our own, returning from the tropics, with white-clad, languid
+figures reclining in canvas chairs; gunboats of this or that nation
+bound on mysterious affairs; once a P. & O. converted into a troopship,
+from whose every available porthole, hatch, deck, and shroud laughing,
+brown, English faces shouted chaff at our German decks--all these
+either tied up for us, or were tied up for by us. The only craft that
+received no consideration on our part were the various picturesque Arab
+dhows, with their single masts and the long yards slanting across them.
+Since these were very small, our suction dragged at them cruelly. As a
+usual thing four vociferous figures clung desperately to a rope passed
+around one of the snubbing-posts ashore, while an old man shrieked
+syllables at them from the dhow itself. As they never by any chance
+thought of mooring her both stem and stern, the dhow generally changed
+ends rapidly, shipping considerable water in the process. It must be
+very trying to get so excited in a hot climate.
+
+The high sandbanks of the early part of the day soon dropped lower to
+afford us a wider view. In its broad, general features the country was,
+quite simply, the desert of Arizona over again. There were the same
+high, distant, and brittle-looking mountains, fragile and pearly; the
+same low, broken half-distances; the same wide sweeps; the same
+wonderful changing effects of light, colour, shadow, and mirage; the
+same occasional strips of green marking the watercourses and oases. As
+to smaller detail, we saw many interesting divergences. In the
+foreground constantly recurred the Bedouin brush shelters, each with its
+picturesque figure or so in flowing robes, and its grumpy camels. Twice
+we saw travelling caravans, exactly like the Bible pictures. At one
+place a single burnoused Arab, leaning on his elbows, reclined full
+length on the sky-line of a clean-cut sandhill. Glittering in the
+mirage, half-guessed, half-seen, we made out distant little white towns
+with slender palm trees. At places the water from the canal had
+overflowed wide tracts of country. Here, along the shore, we saw
+thousands of the water-fowl already familiar to us, as well as such
+strangers as gaudy kingfishers, ibises, and rosy flamingoes.
+
+The canal itself seemed to be in a continual state of repair. Dredgers
+were everywhere; some of the ordinary shovel type, others working by
+suction, and discharging far inland by means of weird huge pipes that
+apparently meandered at will over the face of nature. The control
+stations were beautifully French and neat, painted yellow, each with its
+gorgeous bougainvilleas in flower, its square-rigged signal masts, its
+brightly painted extra buoys standing in a row, its wharf--and its
+impassive Arab fishermen thereon. We reclined in our canvas chairs, had
+lemon squashes brought to us, and watched the entertainment steadily and
+slowly unrolled before us.
+
+We reached the end of the canal about three o'clock of the afternoon,
+and dropped anchor off the low-lying shores. Our binoculars showed us
+white houses in apparently single rank along a far-reaching narrow sand
+spit, with sparse trees and a railroad line. That was the town of Suez,
+and seemed so little interesting that we were not particularly sorry
+that we could not go ashore. Far in the distance were mountains; and the
+water all about us was the light, clear green of the sky at sunset.
+
+Innumerable dhows and row-boats swarmed down, filled with eager salesmen
+of curios and ostrich plumes. They had not much time in which to
+bargain, so they made it up in rapid-fire vociferation. One very tall
+and dignified Arab had as sailor of his craft the most extraordinary
+creature, just above the lower limit of the human race. He was of a dull
+coal black, without a single high light on him anywhere, as though he
+had been sand-papered, had prominent teeth, like those of a baboon, in a
+wrinkled, wizened monkey face, across which were three tattooed bands,
+and possessed a little, long-armed, spare figure, bent and wiry. He
+clambered up and down his mast, fetching things at his master's behest;
+leapt nonchalantly for our rail or his own spar, as the case might be,
+across the staggering abyss; clung so well with his toes that he might
+almost have been classified with the quadrumana; and between times
+squatted humped over on the rail, watching us with bright, elfish, alien
+eyes.
+
+At last the big German sailors bundled the whole variegated horde
+overside. It was time to go, and our anchor chain was already rumbling
+in the hawse pipes. They tumbled hastily into their boats; and at once
+swarmed up their masts, whence they feverishly continued their
+interrupted bargaining. In fact, so fully embarked on the tides of
+commerce were they, that they failed to notice the tides of nature
+widening between us. One old man, in especial, at the very top of his
+mast, jerked hither and thither by the sea, continued imploringly to
+offer an utterly ridiculous carved wooden camel long after it was
+impossible to have completed the transaction should anybody have been
+moonstruck enough to have desired it. Our ship's prow swung; and just at
+sunset, as the lights of Suez were twinkling out one by one, we headed
+down the Red Sea.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+THE RED SEA.
+
+
+Suez is indeed the gateway to the East. In the Mediterranean often the
+sea is rough, the winds cold, passengers are not yet acquainted, and hug
+the saloons or the leeward side of the deck. Once through the canal and
+all is changed by magic. The air is hot and languid; the ship's company
+down to the very scullions appear in immaculate white; the saloon chairs
+and transoms even are put in white coverings; electric fans hum
+everywhere; the run on lemon squashes begins; and many quaint and
+curious customs of the tropics obtain.
+
+For example: it is etiquette that before eight o'clock one may wander
+the decks at will in one's pyjamas, converse affably with fair ladies in
+pigtail and kimono, and be not abashed. But on the stroke of eight bells
+it is also etiquette to disappear very promptly and to array one's self
+for the day; and it is very improper indeed to see or be seen after that
+hour in the rather extreme _negligee_ of the early morning. Also it
+becomes the universal custom, or perhaps I should say the necessity, to
+slumber for an hour after the noon meal. Certainly sleep descending on
+the tropical traveller is armed with a bludgeon. Passengers, crew,
+steerage, "deck," animal, and bird fall down then in an enchantment. I
+have often wondered who navigates the ship during that sacred hour, or,
+indeed, if anybody navigates it at all. Perhaps that time is sacred to
+the genii of the old East, who close all prying mortal eyes, but in
+return lend a guiding hand to the most pressing of mortal affairs. The
+deck of the ship is a curious sight between the hours of half-past one
+and three. The tropical siesta requires no couching of the form. You sit
+down in your chair, with a book--you fade slowly into a deep, restful
+slumber. And yet it is a slumber wherein certain small pleasant things
+persist from the world outside. You remain dimly conscious of the
+rhythmic throbbing of the engines, of the beat of soft, warm air on your
+cheek.
+
+At three o'clock or thereabout you rise as gently back to life, and sit
+erect in your chair without a stretch or a yawn in your whole anatomy.
+Then is the one time of day for a display of energy--if you have any to
+display. Ship games, walks--fairly brisk--explorations to the
+forecastle, a watch for flying fish or Arab dhows, anything until
+tea-time. Then the glowing sunset; the opalescent sea, and the soft
+afterglow of the sky--and the bugle summoning you to dress. That is a
+mean job. Nothing could possibly swelter worse than the tiny cabin. The
+electric fan is an aggravation. You reappear in your fresh "whites"
+somewhat warm and flustered in both mind and body. A turn around the
+deck cools you off; and dinner restores your equanimity--dinner with the
+soft, warm tropic air breathing through all the wide-open ports; the
+electric fans drumming busily; the men all in clean white; the ladies,
+the very few precious ladies, in soft, low gowns. After dinner the deck,
+as near cool as it will be, and heads bare to the breeze of our
+progress, and glowing cigars. At ten or eleven o'clock the groups begin
+to break up, the canvas chairs to empty. Soon reappears a pyjamaed
+figure followed by a steward carrying a mattress. This is spread, under
+its owner's direction, in a dark corner forward. With a sigh you in your
+turn plunge down into the sweltering inferno of your cabin, only to
+reappear likewise with a steward and a mattress. The latter, if you are
+wise, you spread where the wind of the ship's going will be full upon
+you. It is a strong wind and blows upon you heavily, so that the sleeves
+and legs of your pyjamas flop, but it is a soft, warm wind, and beats
+you as with muffled fingers. In no temperate clime can you ever enjoy
+this peculiar effect of a strong breeze on your naked skin without even
+the faintest surface chilly sensation. So habituated has one become to
+feeling cooler in a draught that the absence of chill lends the night an
+unaccustomedness, the more weird in that it is unanalyzed, so that one
+feels definitely that one is in a strange, far country. This is
+intensified by the fact that in these latitudes the moon, the great,
+glorious, calm tropical moon, is directly overhead--follows the centre
+line of the zenith--instead of being, as with us in our temperate zone,
+always more or less declined to the horizon. This, too, lends the night
+an exotic quality, the more effective in that at first the reason for it
+is not apprehended.
+
+A night in the tropics is always more or less broken. One awakens, and
+sleeps again. Motionless white-clad figures, cigarettes glowing, are
+lounging against the rail looking out over a molten sea. The moonlight
+lies in patterns across the deck, shivering slightly under the throb of
+the engines, or occasionally swaying slowly forward or slowly back as
+the ship's course changes, but otherwise motionless, for here the sea is
+always calm. You raise your head, look about, sprawl in a new position
+on your mattress, fall asleep. On one of these occasions you find
+unexpectedly that the velvet-gray night has become steel-gray dawn, and
+that the kindly old quartermaster is bending over you. Sleepily, very
+sleepily, you stagger to your feet and collapse into the nearest chair.
+Then to the swish of water, as the sailors sluice the decks all around
+and under you, you fall into a really deep sleep.
+
+At six o'clock this is broken by chota-hazri, another tropical
+institution, consisting merely of clear tea and biscuits. I never could
+get to care for it, but nowhere in the tropics could I head it off. No
+matter how tired I was or how dead sleepy, I had to receive that
+confounded chota-hazri. Throwing things at the native who brought it did
+no good at all. He merely dodged. Admonition did no good, nor
+prohibition in strong terms. I was but one white man of the whole white
+race; and I had no right to possess idiosyncrasies running counter to
+dastur, the custom. However, as the early hours are profitable hours in
+the tropics, it did not drive me to homicide.
+
+The ship's company now developed. Our two prize members, fortunately for
+us, sat at our table. The first was the Swedish professor
+aforementioned. He was large, benign, paternal, broad in mind,
+thoroughly human and beloved, and yet profoundly erudite. He was our
+iconoclast in the way of food; for he performed small but illuminating
+dissections on his plate, and announced triumphantly results that were
+not a bit in accordance with the menu. A single bone was sufficient to
+take the pretension out of any fish. Our other particular friend was C.,
+with whom later we travelled in the interior of Africa. C. is a very
+celebrated hunter and explorer, an old Africander, his face seamed and
+tanned by many years in a hard climate. For several days we did not
+recognize him, although he sat fairly alongside, but put him down as a
+shy man, and let it go at that. He never stayed for the long _table
+d'hote_ dinners, but fell upon the first solid course and made a
+complete meal from that. When he had quite finished eating all he
+could, he drank all he could; then he departed from the table, and took
+up a remote and inaccessible position in the corner of the smoking-room.
+He was engaged in growing the beard he customarily wore in the jungle--a
+most fierce outstanding Mohammedan-looking beard that terrified the
+intrusive into submission. And yet Bwana C. possesses the kindest blue
+eyes in the world, full of quiet patience, great understanding, and
+infinite gentleness. His manner was abrupt and uncompromising, but he
+would do anything in the world for one who stood in need of him. From
+women he fled; yet Billy won him with infinite patience, and in the
+event they became the closest of friends. Withal he possessed a pair of
+the most powerful shoulders I have ever seen on a man of his frame; and
+in the depths of his mild blue eyes flickered a flame of resolution that
+I could well imagine flaring up to something formidable. Slow to make
+friends, but staunch and loyal; gentle and forbearing, but fierce and
+implacable in action; at once loved and most terribly feared; shy as a
+wild animal, but straightforward and undeviating in his human relations;
+most remarkably quiet and unassuming, but with tremendous vital force in
+his deep eyes and forward-thrust jaw; informed with the widest and most
+understanding humanity, but unforgiving of evildoers; and with the most
+direct and absolute courage, Bwana C. was to me the most interesting man
+I met in Africa, and became the best of my friends.
+
+The only other man at our table happened to be, for our sins, the young
+Englishman mentioned as throwing the first coin to the old woman on the
+pier at Marseilles. We will call him Brown, and, because he represents a
+type, he is worth looking upon for a moment.
+
+He was of the super-enthusiastic sort; bubbling over with vitality, in
+and out of everything; bounding up at odd and languid moments. To an
+extraordinary extent he was afflicted with the spiritual blindness of
+his class. Quite genuinely, quite seriously, he was unconscious of the
+human significance of beings and institutions belonging to a foreign
+country or even to a class other than his own. His own kind he treated
+as complete and understandable human creatures. All others were merely
+objective. As we, to a certain extent, happened to fall in the former
+category, he was as pleasant to us as possible--that is, he was pleasant
+to us in his way, but had not insight enough to guess at how to be
+pleasant to us in our way. But as soon as he got out of his own class,
+or what he conceived to be such, he considered all people as
+"outsiders." He did not credit them with prejudices to rub, with
+feelings to hurt, indeed hardly with ears to overhear. Provided his
+subject was an "outsider," he had not the slightest hesitancy in saying
+exactly what he thought about any one, anywhere, always in his high
+clear English voice, no matter what the time or occasion. As a natural
+corollary he always rebuffed beggars and the like brutally, and was
+always quite sublimely doing little things that thoroughly shocked our
+sense of the other fellow's rights as a human being. In all this he did
+not mean to be cruel or inconsiderate. It was just the way he was built;
+and it never entered his head that "such people" had ears and brains.
+
+In the rest of the ship's company were a dozen or so other Englishmen of
+the upper classes, either army men on shooting trips, or youths going
+out with some idea of settling in the country. They were a clean-built,
+pleasant lot; good people to know anywhere, but of no unusual interest.
+It was only when one went abroad into the other nations that inscribable
+human interest could be found.
+
+There was the Greek, Scutari, and his bride, a languorous rather
+opulent beauty, with large dark eyes for all men, and a luxurious manner
+of lying back and fanning herself. She talked, soft-voiced, in half a
+dozen languages, changing from one to the other without a break in
+either her fluency or her thought. Her little lithe, active husband sat
+around and adored her. He was apparently a very able citizen indeed, for
+he was going out to take charge of the construction work on a German
+railway. To have filched so important a job from the Germans themselves
+shows that he must have had ability. With them were a middle-aged
+Holland couple, engaged conscientiously in travelling over the globe.
+They had been everywhere--the two American hemispheres, from one Arctic
+Sea to another, Siberia, China, the Malay Archipelago, this, that, and
+the other odd corner of the world. Always they sat placidly side by
+side, either in the saloon or on deck, smiling benignly, and conversing
+in spaced, comfortable syllables with everybody who happened along. Mrs.
+Breemen worked industriously on some kind of feminine gear, and
+explained to all and sundry that she travelled "to see de sceenery wid
+my hoos-band."
+
+Also in this group was a small wiry German doctor, who had lived for
+many years in the far interior of Africa, and was now returning after
+his vacation. He was a little man, bright-eyed and keen, with a clear
+complexion and hard flesh, in striking and agreeable contrast to most of
+his compatriots. The latter were trying to drink all the beer on the
+ship; but as she had been stocked for an eighty-day voyage, of which
+this was but the second week, they were not making noticeable headway.
+However, they did not seem to be easily discouraged. The Herr Doktor was
+most polite and attentive, but as we did not talk German nor much
+Swahili, and he had neither English nor much French, we had our
+difficulties. I have heard Billy in talking to him scatter fragments of
+these four languages through a single sentence!
+
+For several days we drifted down a warm flat sea. Then one morning we
+came on deck to find ourselves close aboard a number of volcanic
+islands. They were composed entirely of red and dark purple lava blocks,
+rugged, quite without vegetation save for occasional patches of stringy
+green in a gully; and uninhabited except for a lighthouse on one, and a
+fishing shanty near the shores of another. The high mournful mountains,
+with their dark shadows, seemed to brood over hot desolation. The rusted
+and battered stern of a wrecked steamer stuck up at an acute angle from
+the surges. Shortly after we picked up the shores of Arabia.
+
+Note the advantages of a half ignorance. From early childhood we had
+thought of Arabia as the "burning desert"--flat, of course--and of the
+Red Sea as bordered by "shifting sands" alone. If we had known the
+truth--if we had not been half ignorant--we would have missed the
+profound surprise of discovering that in reality the Red Sea is bordered
+by high and rugged mountains, leaving just space enough between
+themselves and the shore for a sloping plain on which our glasses could
+make out occasional palms. Perhaps the "shifting sands of the burning
+desert" lie somewhere beyond; but somebody might have mentioned these
+great mountains! After examining them attentively we had to confess that
+if this sort of thing continued farther north the children of Israel
+must have had a very hard time of it. Mocha shone white, glittering, and
+low, with the red and white spire of a mosque rising brilliantly above
+it.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+ADEN.
+
+
+It was cooler; and for a change we had turned into our bunks, when B.
+pounded on our stateroom door.
+
+"In the name of the Eternal East," said he, "come on deck!"
+
+We slipped on kimonos, and joined the row of scantily draped and
+interested figures along the rail.
+
+The ship lay quite still on a perfect sea of moonlight, bordered by a
+low flat distant shore on one side, and nearer mountains on the other. A
+strong flare, centred from two ship reflectors overside, made a focus of
+illumination that subdued, but could not quench, the soft moonlight with
+which all outside was silvered. A dozen boats, striving against a
+current or clinging as best they could to the ship's side, glided into
+the light and became real and solid; or dropped back into the ghostly
+white unsubstantiality of the moon. They were long, narrow boats, with
+small flush decks fore and aft. We looked down on them from almost
+directly above, so that we saw the thwarts and the ribs and the things
+they contained.
+
+Astern in each stood men, bending gracefully against the thrust of long
+sweeps. About their waists were squares of cloth, wrapped twice and
+tucked in. Otherwise they were naked, and the long smooth muscles of
+their slender bodies rippled under the skin. The latter was of a
+beautiful fine texture, and chocolate brown. These men had keen,
+intelligent, clear-cut faces, of the Greek order, as though the statues
+of a garden had been stained brown and had come to life. They leaned on
+their sweeps, thrusting slowly but strongly against the little wind and
+current that would drift them back.
+
+In the body of the boats crouched, sat, or lay a picturesque mob. Some
+pulled spasmodically on the very long limber oars; others squatted doing
+nothing; some, huddled shapelessly underneath white cloths that
+completely covered them, slept soundly in the bottom. We took these for
+merchandise until one of them suddenly threw aside his covering and sat
+up. Others, again, poised in proud and graceful attitudes on the
+extreme prows of their bobbing craft. Especially decorative were two,
+clad only in immense white turbans and white cloths about the waist. An
+old Arab with a white beard stood midships in one boat, quite
+motionless, except for the slight swaying necessary to preserve his
+equilibrium, his voluminous white draperies fluttering in the wind, his
+dark face just distinguishable under his burnouse. Most of the men were
+Somalis, however. Their keen small faces, slender but graceful necks,
+slim, well-formed torsos bending to every movement of the boat, and the
+white or gaudy draped nether garments were as decorative as the figures
+on an Egyptian tomb. One or two of the more barbaric had made neat
+headdresses of white clay plastered in the form of a skull-cap.
+
+After an interval a small and fussy tugboat steamed around our stern and
+drew alongside the gangway. Three passengers disembarked from her and
+made their way aboard. The main deck of the craft under an awning was
+heavily encumbered with trunks, tin boxes, hand baggage, tin bath-tubs,
+gun cases, and all sorts of impedimenta. The tugboat moored itself to us
+fore and aft, and proceeded to think about discharging. Perhaps twenty
+men in accurate replica of those in the small boats had charge of the
+job. They had their own methods. After a long interval devoted strictly
+to nothing, some unfathomable impulse would incite one or two or three
+of the natives to tackle a trunk. At it they tugged and heaved and
+pushed in the manner of ants making off with a particularly large fly or
+other treasure trove, tossing it up the steep gangway to the level of
+our decks. The trunks once safely bestowed, all interest, all industry,
+died. We thought that finished it, and wondered why the tug did not pull
+out of the way. But always, after an interval, another bright idea would
+strike another native or natives. He--or they--would disappear beneath
+the canvas awning over the tug's deck, to emerge shortly, carrying
+almost anything, from a parasol to a heavy chest.
+
+On close inspection they proved to be a very small people. The
+impression of graceful height had come from the slenderness and justness
+of their proportions, the smallness of their bones, and the upright
+grace of their carriage. After standing alongside one, we acquired a
+fine respect for their ability to handle those trunks at all.
+
+Moored to the other side of the ship we found two huge lighters, from
+which bales of goods were being hoisted aboard. Two camels and a dozen
+diminutive mules stood in the waist of one of these craft. The camels
+were as sniffy and supercilious and scornful as camels always are; and
+everybody promptly hated them with the hatred of the abysmally inferior
+spirit for something that scorns it, as is the usual attitude of the
+human mind towards camels. We waited for upwards of an hour, in the hope
+of seeing those camels hoisted aboard; but in vain. While we were so
+waiting one of the deck passengers below us, a Somali in white clothes
+and a gorgeous cerise turban, decided to turn in. He spread a square of
+thin matting atop one of the hatches, and began to unwind yards and
+yards of the fine silk turban. He came to the end of it--whisk! he sank
+to the deck; the turban, spread open by the resistance of the air,
+fluttered down to cover him from head to foot. Apparently he fell asleep
+at once, for he did not again move nor alter his position. He, as well
+as an astonishingly large proportion of the other Somalis and
+Abyssinians we saw, carried a queer, well-defined, triangular wound in
+his head. It had long since healed, was an inch or so across, and looked
+as though a piece of the skull had been removed. If a conscientious
+enemy had leisure and an icepick he would do just about that sort of a
+job. How its recipient had escaped instant death is a mystery.
+
+At length, about three o'clock, despairing of the camels, we turned in.
+
+After three hours' sleep we were again on deck. Aden by daylight seemed
+to be several sections of a town tucked into pockets in bold, raw, lava
+mountains that came down fairly to the water's edge. Between these
+pockets ran a narrow shore road; and along the road paced haughty camels
+hitched to diminutive carts. On contracted round bluffs towards the sea
+were various low bungalow buildings which, we were informed, comprised
+the military and civil officers' quarters. The real Aden has been built
+inland a short distance at the bottom of a cup in the mountains.
+Elaborate stone reservoirs have been constructed to catch rain water, as
+there is no other natural water supply whatever. The only difficulty is
+that it practically never rains; so the reservoirs stand empty, the
+water is distilled from the sea, and the haughty camels and the little
+carts do the distributing.
+
+The lava mountains occupy one side of the spacious bay or gulf. The
+foot of the bay and the other side are flat, with one or two very
+distant white villages, and many heaps of glittering salt as big as
+houses.
+
+We waited patiently at the rail for an hour more to see the camels slung
+aboard by the crane. It was worth the wait. They lost their impassive
+and immemorial dignity completely, sprawling, groaning, positively
+shrieking in dismay. When the solid deck rose to them, and the sling had
+been loosened, however, they regained their poise instantaneously. Their
+noses went up in the air, and they looked about them with a challenging,
+unsmiling superiority, as though to dare any one of us to laugh. Their
+native attendants immediately squatted down in front of them, and began
+to feed them with convenient lengths of what looked like our common
+marsh cat-tails. The camels did not even then manifest the slightest
+interest in the proceedings. Indeed, they would not condescend to reach
+out three inches for the most luscious tit-bit held that far from their
+aristocratic noses. The attendants had actually to thrust the fodder
+between their jaws. I am glad to say they condescended to chew.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+THE INDIAN OCEAN.
+
+
+Leaving Aden, and rounding the great promontory of Cape Guardafui, we
+turned south along the coast of Africa. Off the cape were strange, oily
+cross rips and currents on the surface of the sea; the flying-fish rose
+in flocks before our bows; high mountains of peaks and flat table tops
+thrust their summits into clouds; and along the coast the breakers
+spouted like whales. For the first time, too, we began to experience
+what our preconceptions had imagined as tropical heat. Heretofore we had
+been hot enough, in all conscience, but the air had felt as though
+wafted from an opened furnace door--dry and scorching. Now, although the
+temperature was lower,[2] the humidity was greater. A swooning languor
+was abroad over the spellbound ocean, a relaxing mist of enchantment.
+
+My glasses were constantly clouding over with a fine coating of water
+drops; exposed metal rusted overnight; the folds in garments accumulated
+mildew in an astonishingly brief period of time. There was never even
+the suggestion of chill in this dampness. It clung and enveloped like a
+grateful garment; and seemed only to lack sweet perfume.
+
+At this time, by good fortune, it happened that the moon came full. We
+had enjoyed its waxing during our voyage down the Red Sea; but now it
+had reached its greatest phase, and hung over the slumbering tropic
+ocean like a lantern. The lazy sea stirred beneath it, and the ship
+glided on, its lights fairly subdued by the splendour of the waters.
+Under the awnings the ship's company lounged in lazy attitudes or
+promenaded slowly, talking low voiced, cigars glowing in the splendid
+dusk. Overside, in the furrow of the disturbed waters, the
+phosphorescence flashed perpetually beneath the shadow of the ship.
+
+The days passed by languidly and all alike. On the chart outside the
+smoking-room door the procession of tiny German flags on pins marched
+steadily, an inch at a time, towards the south. Otherwise we might as
+well have imagined ourselves midgets afloat in a pond and getting
+nowhere.
+
+Somewhere north of the equator--before Father Neptune in ancient style
+had come aboard and ducked the lot of us--we were treated to the
+spectacle of how the German "sheep" reacts under a joke. Each nation has
+its type of fool; and all, for the joyousness of mankind, differ. On the
+bulletin board one evening appeared a notice to the effect that the
+following morning a limited number of sportsmen would be permitted
+ashore for the day. Each was advised to bring his own lunch, rifle, and
+drinks. The reason alleged was that the ship must round a certain cape
+across which the sportsmen could march afoot in sufficient time to
+permit them a little shooting.
+
+Now aboard ship were a dozen English, four Americans, and thirty or
+forty Germans. The Americans and English looked upon that bulletin,
+smiled gently, and went to order another round of lemon squashes. It was
+a meek, mild, little joke enough; but surely the bulletin board was as
+far as it could possibly go. Next morning, however, we observed a
+half-dozen of our German friends in khaki and sun helmet, very busy with
+lunch boxes, bottles of beer, rifles, and the like. They said they were
+going ashore as per bulletin. We looked at each other and hied us to the
+upper deck. There we found one of the boats slung overside, with our old
+friend the quartermaster ostentatiously stowing kegs of water, boxes,
+and the like.
+
+"When," we inquired gently, "does the expedition start?"
+
+"At ten o'clock," said he.
+
+It was now within fifteen minutes of that hour.
+
+We were at the time fully ten miles off shore, and forging ahead full
+speed parallel with the coast.
+
+We pointed out this fact to the quartermaster, but found, to our sorrow,
+that the poor old man had suddenly gone deaf! We therefore refrained
+from asking several other questions that had occurred to us--such as,
+why the cape was not shown on the map.
+
+"Somebody," said one of the Americans, a cowboy going out second class
+on the look for new cattle country, "is a goat. It sure looks to me like
+it was these yere steamboat people. They can't expect to rope nothing on
+such a raw deal as this!"
+
+To which the English assented, though in different idiom.
+
+But now up the companion ladder struggled eight serious-minded
+individuals herded by the second mate. They were armed to the teeth, and
+thoroughly equipped with things I had seen in German catalogues, but in
+whose existence I had never believed. A half-dozen sailors eagerly
+helped them with their multitudinous effects. Not a thought gave they to
+the fact that we were ten miles off the coast, that we gave no
+indication of slackening speed, that it would take the rest of the day
+to row ashore, that there was no cape for us to round, that if there
+were--oh! all the other hundred improbabilities peculiar to the
+situation. Under direction of the mate they deposited their impedimenta
+beneath a tarpaulin, and took their places in solemn rows amidships
+across the thwarts of the boat slung overside. The importance of the
+occasion sat upon them heavily; they were going ashore--in Africa--to
+Slay Wild Beasts. They looked upon themselves as of bolder, sterner
+stuff than the rest of us.
+
+When the procession first appeared, our cowboy's face for a single
+instant had flamed with amazed incredulity. Then a mask of
+expressionless stolidity fell across his features, which in no line
+thereafter varied one iota.
+
+"What are they going to do with them?" murmured one of the Englishmen,
+at a loss.
+
+"I reckon," said the cowboy, "that they look on this as the easiest way
+to drown them all to onct."
+
+Then from behind one of the other boats suddenly appeared a huge German
+sailor with a hose. The devoted imbeciles in the shore boat were
+drenched as by a cloud-burst. Back and forth and up and down the heavy
+stream played, while every other human being about the ship shrieked
+with joy. Did the victims rise up in a body and capture that hose nozzle
+and turn the stream to sweep the decks? Did they duck for shelter? Did
+they at least know enough to scatter and run? They did none of these
+things; but sat there in meek little rows like mannikins until the boat
+was half full of water and everything awash. Then, when the sailor shut
+off the stream, they continued to sit there until the mate came to order
+them out. Why? I cannot tell you. Perhaps that is the German idea of how
+to take a joke. Perhaps they were afraid worse things might be
+consequent on resistance. Perhaps they still hoped to go ashore. One of
+the Englishmen asked just that question.
+
+"What," he demanded disgustedly, "what is the matter with the beggars?"
+
+Our cowboy may have had the correct solution. He stretched his long
+legs and jumped down from the rail.
+
+"Nothing stirring above the ears," said he.
+
+It is customary in books of travel to describe this part of the journey
+somewhat as follows: "Skirting the low and uninteresting shores of
+Africa we at length reached," etc. Low and uninteresting shores! Through
+the glasses we made out distant mountains far beyond nearer hills. The
+latter were green-covered with dense forests whence rose mysterious
+smokes. Along the shore we saw an occasional cocoanut plantation to the
+water's edge and native huts and villages of thatch. Canoes of strange
+models lay drawn up on shelving beaches; queer fish-pounds of brush
+reached out considerable distances from the coast. The white surf
+pounded on a yellow beach.
+
+All about these things was the jungle, hemming in the plantations and
+villages, bordering the lagoons, creeping down until it fairly overhung
+the yellow beaches; as though, conqueror through all the country beyond,
+it were half-inclined to dispute dominion with old Ocean himself. It
+looked from the distance like a thick, soft coverlet thrown down over
+the country; following--or, rather, suggesting--the inequalities.
+Through the glasses we were occasionally able to peep under the edge of
+this coverlet, and see where the fringe of the jungle drew back in a
+little pocket, or to catch the sheen of mysterious dark rivers slipping
+to the sea. Up these dark rivers, by way of the entrances of these tiny
+pockets, the imagination then could lead on into the dimness beneath the
+sunlit upper surfaces.
+
+Towards the close of one afternoon we changed our course slightly, and
+swung in on a long slant towards the coast. We did it casually; too
+casually for so very important an action, for now at last we were about
+to touch the mysterious continent. Then we saw clearer the fine, big
+groves of palm and the luxuriance of the tropical vegetation. Against
+the greenery, bold and white, shone the buildings of Mombasa; and after
+a little while we saw an inland glitter that represented her narrow,
+deep bay, the stern of a wreck against the low, green cliffs, and
+strange, fat-trunked squat trees without leaves. Straight past all this
+we glided at half speed, then turned sharp to the right to enter a long
+wide expanse like a river, with green banks, twenty feet or so in
+height, grown thickly with the tall cocoanut palms. These gave way at
+times into broad, low lagoons, at the end of which were small beaches
+and boats, and native huts among more cocoanut groves. Through our
+glasses we could see the black men watching us, quite motionless,
+squatted on their heels.
+
+It was like suddenly entering another world, this gliding from the open
+sea straight into the heart of a green land. The ceaseless wash of waves
+we had left outside with the ocean; our engines had fallen silent.
+Across the hushed waters came to us strange chantings and the beating of
+a tom-tom, an occasional shrill shout from the unknown jungle. The sun
+was just set, and the tops of the palms caught the last rays; all below
+was dense green shadow. Across the surface of the water glided dug-out
+canoes of shapes strange to us. We passed ancient ruins almost
+completely dismantled, their stones half smothered in green rank growth.
+The wide river-like bay stretched on before us as far as the waning
+light permitted us to see; finally losing itself in the heart of
+mystery.
+
+Steadily and confidently our ship steamed forward, until at last, when
+we seemed to be afloat in a land-locked lake, we dropped anchor and came
+to rest.
+
+Darkness fell utterly before the usual quarantine regulations had been
+carried through. Active and efficient agents had already taken charge
+of our affairs, so we had only to wait idly by the rail until summoned.
+Then we jostled our way down the long gangway, passed and repassed by
+natives carrying baggage or returning for more baggage, stepped briskly
+aboard a very bobby little craft, clambered over a huge pile of baggage,
+and stowed ourselves as best we could. A figure in a long white robe sat
+astern, tiller ropes in hand; two half-naked blacks far up towards the
+prow manipulated a pair of tremendous sweeps. With a vast heaving,
+jabbering, and shouting, our boat disengaged itself from the swarm of
+other craft. We floated around the stern of our ship, and were
+immediately suspended in blackness dotted with the stars and their
+reflections, and with various twinkling scattered lights. To one of
+these we steered, and presently touched at a stone quay with steps. At
+last we set foot on the land to which so long we had journeyed and
+towards which our expectations had grown so great. We experienced "the
+pleasure that touches the souls of men landing on strange shores."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] 82-88 deg. degrees in daytime, and 75-83 deg. degrees at night.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+MOMBASA.
+
+
+A single light shone at the end of the stone quay, and another inside a
+big indeterminate building at some distance. We stumbled towards this,
+and found it to be the biggest shed ever constructed out of corrugated
+iron. A bearded Sikh stood on guard at its open entrance. He let any one
+and every one enter, with never a flicker of his expressionless black
+eyes; but allowed no one to go out again without the closest scrutiny
+for dutiable articles that lacked the blue customs plaster. We entered.
+The place was vast and barnlike and dim, and very, very hot. A
+half-dozen East Indians stood behind the counters; another, a babu, sat
+at a little desk ready to give his clerical attention to what might be
+required. We saw no European; but next morning found that one passed his
+daylight hours in this inferno of heat. For the moment we let our main
+baggage go, and occupied ourselves only with getting through our smaller
+effects. This accomplished, we stepped out past the Sikh into the
+grateful night.
+
+We had as guide a slender and wiry individual clad in tarboush and long
+white robe. In a vague, general way we knew that the town of Mombasa was
+across the island and about four miles distant. In what direction or how
+we got there we had not the remotest idea.
+
+The guide set off at a brisk pace with which we tried in vain to keep
+step. He knew the ground, and we did not; and the night was black dark.
+Commands to stop were of no avail whatever; nor could we get hold of him
+to restrain him by force. When we put on speed he put on speed too. His
+white robe glimmered ahead of us just in sight; and in the darkness
+other white robes, passing and crossing, glimmered also. At first the
+ground was rough, so that we stumbled outrageously. Billy and B. soon
+fell behind, and I heard their voices calling plaintively for us to slow
+down a bit.
+
+"If I ever lose this nigger, I'll never find him again," I shouted back,
+"but I can find you. Do the best you can!"
+
+We struck a smoother road that led up a hill on a long slant.
+Apparently for miles we followed thus, the white-robed individual ahead
+still deaf to all commands and the blood-curdling threats I had now come
+to uttering. All our personal baggage had long since mysteriously
+disappeared, ravished away from us at the customs house by a ragged
+horde of blacks. It began to look as though we were stranded in Africa
+without baggage or effects. Billy and B. were all the time growing
+fainter in the distance, though evidently they too had struck the long,
+slanting road.
+
+Then we came to a dim, solitary lantern glowing feebly beside a bench at
+what appeared to be the top of the hill. Here our guide at last came to
+a halt and turned to me a grinning face.
+
+"Samama hapa," he observed.
+
+There! That was the word I had been frantically searching my memory for!
+Samama--stop!
+
+The others struggled in. We were very warm. Up to the bench led a tiny
+car track, the rails not over two feet apart, like the toy railroads
+children use. This did not look much like grownup transportation, but it
+and the bench and the dim lantern represented all the visible world.
+
+We sat philosophically on the bench and enjoyed the soft tropical
+night. The air was tepid, heavy with unknown perfume, black as a band of
+velvet across the eyes, musical with the subdued undertones of a
+thousand thousand night insects. At points overhead the soft blind
+darkness melted imperceptibly into stars.
+
+After a long interval we distinguished a distant faint rattling, that
+each moment increased in loudness. Shortly came into view along the
+narrow tracks a most extraordinary vehicle. It was a small square
+platform on wheels, across which ran a bench seat, and over which spread
+a canopy. It carried also a dim lantern. This rumbled up to us and
+stopped. From its stern hopped two black boys. Obeying a smiling
+invitation, we took our places on the bench. The two boys immediately
+set to pushing us along the narrow track.
+
+We were off at an astonishing speed through the darkness. The night was
+deliciously tepid; and, as I have said, absolutely dark. We made out the
+tops of palms and the dim loom of great spreading trees, and could smell
+sweet, soft odours. The bare-headed, lightly-clad boys pattered
+alongside whenever the grade was easy, one hand resting against the
+rail; or pushed mightily up little hills; or clung alongside like
+monkeys while we rattled and swooped and plunged down hill into the
+darkness. Subsequently we learned that a huge flat beam projecting
+amidships from beneath the seat operated a brake which we above were
+supposed to manipulate; but being quite ignorant as to the ethics and
+mechanics of this strange street-car system, we swung and swayed at
+times quite breathlessly.
+
+After about fifteen minutes we began to pick up lights ahead, then to
+pass dimly-seen garden walls with trees whose brilliant flowers the
+lantern revealed fitfully. At last we made out white stucco houses, and
+shortly drew up with a flourish before the hotel itself.
+
+This was a two-story stucco affair, with deep verandas sunken in at each
+story. It fronted a wide white street facing a public garden; and this,
+we subsequently discovered, was about the only clear and open space in
+all the narrow town. Antelope horns were everywhere hung on the walls;
+and teakwood easy-chairs, with rests on which comfortably to elevate
+your feet above your head, stood all about. We entered a bare,
+brick-floored dining-room, and partook of tropical fruits quite new to
+us--papayes, mangoes, custard apples, pawpaws, and the small red eating
+bananas too delicate for export. Overhead the punkahs swung back and
+forth in lazy hypnotic rhythm. We could see the two blacks at the ends
+of the punkah cords outside on the veranda, their bodies swaying lithely
+in alternation as they threw their weight against the light ropes. Other
+blacks, in the long white robes and exquisitely worked white skull caps
+of the Swahili, glided noiselessly on bare feet, serving.
+
+After dinner we sat out until midnight in the teakwood chairs of the
+upper gallery, staring through the arches into the black, mysterious
+night, for it was very hot, and we rather dreaded the necessary mosquito
+veils as likely to prove stuffy. The mosquitoes are few in Mombasa, but
+they are very deadly--very. At midnight the thermometer stood 87 deg. F.
+
+Our premonitions as to stuffiness were well justified. After a restless
+night we came awake at daylight to the sound of a fine row of some sort
+going on outside in the streets. Immediately we arose, threw aside the
+lattices, and hung out over the sill.
+
+The chalk-white road stretched before us. Opposite was a public square,
+grown with brilliant flowers, and flowering trees. We could not doubt
+the cause of the trouble. An Indian on a bicycle, hurrying to his
+office, had knocked down a native child. Said child, quite naked, sat
+in the middle of the white dust and howled to rend the heavens--whenever
+he felt himself observed. If, however, the attention of the crowd
+happened for the moment to be engrossed with the babu, the injured one
+sat up straight and watched the row with interested, rolling, pickaninny
+eyes. A native policeman made the centre of a whirling, vociferating
+group. He was a fine-looking chap, straight and soldierly, dressed in
+red tarboosh, khaki coat bound close around the waist by yards and yards
+of broad red webbing, loose, short drawers of khaki, bare knees and
+feet, and blue puttees between. His manner was inflexible. The babu
+jabbered excitedly; telling, in all probability, how he was innocent of
+fault, was late for his work, etc. In vain. He had to go; also the kid,
+who now, seeing himself again an object of interest, recommenced his
+howling. Then the babu began frantically to indicate members of the
+crowd whom he desired to retain as witnesses. Evidently not pleased with
+the prospect of appearing in court, those indicated promptly ducked and
+ran. The policeman as promptly pursued and collared them one by one. He
+was a long-legged policeman, and he ran well. The moment he laid hands
+on a fugitive, the latter collapsed; whereupon the policeman dropped him
+and took after another. The joke of it was that the one so abandoned did
+not try again to make off, but stayed as though he had been tagged at
+some game. Finally the whole lot, still vociferating, moved off down the
+white road.
+
+For over an hour we hung from our window sill, thoroughly interested and
+amused by the varied life that deployed before our eyes. The morning
+seemed deliciously cool after the hot night, although the thermometer
+stood high. The sky was very blue, with big piled white clouds down near
+the horizon. Dazzling sun shone on the white road, the white buildings
+visible up and down the street, the white walls enclosing their gardens,
+and the greenery and colours of the trees within them. For from what we
+could see from our window we immediately voted tropical vegetation quite
+up to advertisement: whole trees of gaudy red or yellow or bright orange
+blossoms, flowering vines, flowering shrubs, peered over the walls or
+through the fences; and behind them rose great mangoes or the slenderer
+shafts of bananas and cocoanut palms.
+
+Up and down wandered groups of various sorts of natives. A month later
+we would have been able to identify their different tribes and to know
+more about them; but now we wondered at them, as strange and
+picturesque peoples. They impressed us in general as being a fine lot of
+men, for they were of good physique, carried themselves well, and looked
+about them with a certain dignity and independence, a fine free pride of
+carriage and of step. This fact alone differentiated them from our own
+negroes; but, further, their features were in general much finer, and
+their skins of a clear mahogany beautiful in its satiny texture.
+Most--and these were the blackest--wore long white robes and fine
+openwork skull caps. They were the local race, the Swahili, had we but
+known it; the original "Zanzibari" who furnished Livingstone, Stanley,
+Speke, and the other early explorers with their men. Others, however,
+were much less "civilized." We saw one "Cook's tour from the jungle"
+consisting of six savages, their hair twisted into innumerable points,
+their ear lobes stretched to hang fairly to their shoulders, wearing
+only a rather neglectful blanket, adorned with polished wire, carrying
+war clubs and bright spears. They followed, with eyes and mouths open, a
+very sophisticated-looking city cousin in the usual white garments,
+swinging a jaunty, light bamboo cane. The cane seems to be a
+distinguishing mark of the leisured class. It not only means that you
+are not working, but also that you have no earthly desire to work.
+
+About this time one of the hotel boys brought the inevitable
+chota-hazri--the tea and biscuits of early morning. For this once it was
+very welcome.
+
+Our hotel proved to be on the direct line of freighting. There are no
+horses or draught animals in Mombasa; the fly is too deadly. Therefore
+all hauling is done by hand. The tiny tracks of the unique street car
+system run everywhere any one would wish to go; branching off even into
+private grounds and to the very front doors of bungalows situated far
+out of town. Each resident owns his own street car, just as elsewhere a
+man has his own carriage. There are, of course, public cars also, each
+with its pair of boys to push it; and also a number of rather decrepit
+rickshaws. As a natural corollary to the passenger traffic, the
+freighting also is handled by the blacks on large flat trucks with short
+guiding poles. These men are quite naked save for a small loin cloth;
+are beautifully shaped; and glisten all over with perspiration shining
+in the sun. So fine is the texture of their skins, the softness of their
+colour--so rippling the play of muscles--that this shining perspiration
+is like a beautiful polish. They rush from behind, slowly and steadily,
+and patiently and unwaveringly, the most tremendous loads of the
+heaviest stuffs. When the hill becomes too steep for them, they turn
+their backs against the truck; and by placing one foot behind the other,
+a few inches at a time, they edge their burden up the slope.
+
+The steering is done by one man at the pole or tongue in front. This
+individual also sets the key to the song by which in Africa all heavy
+labour is carried forward. He cries his wavering shrill-voiced chant;
+the toilers utter antiphony in low gruff tones. At a distance one hears
+only the wild high syncopated chanting; but as the affair draws slowly
+nearer, he catches the undertone of the responses. These latter are cast
+in the regular swing and rhythm of effort; but the steersman throws in
+his bit at odd and irregular intervals. Thus:
+
+Headman (shrill): "Hay, ah mon!"
+
+Pushers (gruff in rhythm): "Tunk!--tunk!--tunk!--" or:
+
+Headman (and wavering minor chant): "Ah--nah--nee--e-e-e!"
+
+Pushers (undertone): "Umbwa--jo-e! Um-bwa--jo--e!"
+
+These wild and barbaric chantings--in the distance; near at hand; dying
+into distance again--slow, dogged, toilsome, came to be to us one of the
+typical features of the place.
+
+After breakfast we put on our sun helmets and went forth curiously to
+view the town. We found it roughly divided into four quarters--the old
+Portuguese, the Arabic, the European, and the native. The Portuguese
+comprises the outer fringe next the water-front of the inner bay. It is
+very narrow of street, with whitewashed walls, balconies, and wonderful
+carven and studded doors. The business of the town is done here. The
+Arabic quarter lies back of it--a maze of narrow alleys winding
+aimlessly here and there between high white buildings, with occasionally
+the minarets and towers of a mosque. This district harboured, besides
+the upper-class Swahilis and Arabs, a large number of East Indians.
+Still back of this are thousands of the low grass, or mud and wattle
+huts of the natives, their roofs thatched with straw or palm. These are
+apparently arranged on little system. The small European population
+lives atop the sea bluffs beyond the old fort in the most attractive
+bungalows. This, the most desirable location of all, has remained open
+to them because heretofore the fierce wars with which Mombasa, "the
+Island of Blood," has been swept have made the exposed seaward lands
+impossible.
+
+No idle occupation can be more fascinating than to wander about the
+mazes of this ancient town. The variety of race and occupation is
+something astounding. Probably the one human note that, everywhere
+persisting, draws the whole together is furnished by the water-carriers.
+Mombasa has no water system whatever. The entire supply is drawn from
+numberless picturesque wells scattered everywhere in the crowded centre,
+and distributed mainly in Standard Oil cans suspended at either end of a
+short pole. By dint of constant daily exercise, hauling water up from a
+depth and carrying it various distances, these men have developed the
+most beautifully powerful figures. They proceed at a half trot, the
+slender poles, with forty pounds at either end, seeming fairly to cut
+into their naked shoulders, muttering a word of warning to the loiterers
+at every other breath--semeelay! semeelay! No matter in what part of
+Mombasa you may happen to be, or at what hour of the day or night, you
+will meet these industrious little men trotting along under their
+burdens.
+
+Everywhere also are the women, carrying themselves proudly erect, with a
+free swing of the hips. They wear invariably a single sheet of cotton
+cloth printed in blue or black with the most astonishing borders and
+spotty designs. This is drawn tight just above the breasts, leaving the
+shoulders and arms bare. Their hair is divided into perhaps a dozen
+parts running lengthwise of the head from the forehead to the nape of
+the neck, after the manner of the stripes on a watermelon. Each part
+then ends in a tiny twisted pigtail not over an inch long. The lobes of
+their ears have been stretched until they hold thick round disks about
+three inches in diameter, ornamented by concentric circles of different
+colours, with a red bull's eye for a centre. The outer edges of the ears
+are then further decorated with gold clasps set closely together. Many
+bracelets, necklaces, and armlets complete the get-up. They are big
+women, with soft velvety skins and a proud and haughty carriage--the
+counterparts of the men in the white robes and caps.
+
+By the way, it may be a good place here to remark that these garments,
+and the patterned squares of cloth worn by the women, are invariably
+most spotlessly clean.
+
+These, we learned, were the Swahilis, the ruling class, the descendants
+of the slave traders. Beside them are all sorts and conditions. Your
+true savage pleased his own fancy as to dress and personal adornment.
+The bushmen generally shaved the edges of their wool to leave a nice
+close-fitting natural skull cap, wore a single blanket draped from one
+shoulder, and carried a war club. The ear lobe seemed always to be
+stretched; sometimes sufficiently to have carried a pint bottle. Indeed,
+white marmalade jars seemed to be very popular wear. One ingenious
+person had acquired a dozen of the sort of safety pins used to fasten
+curtains to their rings. These he had snapped into the lobes, six on a
+side.
+
+We explored for some time. One of the Swahilis attached himself to us so
+unobtrusively that before we knew it we had accepted him as guide. In
+that capacity he realized an ideal, for he never addressed a word to us,
+nor did he even stay in sight. We wandered along at our sweet will,
+dawdling as slowly as we pleased. The guide had apparently quite
+disappeared. Look where we would we could in no manner discover him. At
+the next corner we would pause, undecided as to what to do; there, in
+the middle distance, would stand our friend, smiling. When he was sure
+we had seen him, and were about to take the turn properly, he would
+disappear again. Convoyed in this pleasant fashion we wound and twisted
+up and down and round and about through the most appalling maze. We saw
+the native markets with their vociferating sellers seated cross-legged
+on tables behind piles of fruit or vegetables, while an equally
+vociferating crowd surged up and down the aisles. Gray parrots and
+little monkeys perched everywhere about. Billy gave one of the monkeys a
+banana. He peeled it exactly as a man would have done, smelt it
+critically, and threw it back at her in the most insulting fashion. We
+saw also the rows of Hindu shops open to the street, with their gaudily
+dressed children of blackened eyelids, their stolid dirty proprietors,
+and their women marvellous in bright silks and massive bangles. In the
+thatched native quarter were more of the fine Swahili women sitting
+cross-legged on the earth under low verandas, engaged in different
+handicrafts; and chickens; and many amusing naked children. We made
+friends with many of them, communicating by laughter and by signs, while
+our guide stood unobtrusively in the middle distance waiting for us to
+come on. Just at sunset he led us out to a great open space, with a tall
+palm in the centre of it and the gathering of a multitude of people. A
+mollah was clambering into a high scaffold built of poles, whence
+shortly he began to intone a long-drawn-out "Allah! Allah! il Allah!"
+The cocoanut palms cut the sunset, and the boabab trees--the fat, lazy
+boababs--looked more monstrous than ever. We called our guide and
+conferred on him the munificent sum of sixteen and a half cents; with
+which, apparently much pleased, he departed. Then slowly we wandered
+back to the hotel.
+
+
+
+
+PART II.
+
+THE SHIMBA HILLS.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+A TROPICAL JUNGLE.
+
+
+Many months later, and after adventures elsewhere described,[3] besides
+others not relevant for the moment, F., an Englishman, and I returned to
+Mombasa. We came from some hundred odd miles in the interior where we
+had been exploring the sources and the course of the Tsavo River. Now
+our purpose was to penetrate into the low, hot, wooded country along the
+coast known as the Shimba Hills in quest of a rare beast called the
+sable antelope.
+
+These hills could be approached in one of two ways--by crossing the
+harbour, and then marching two days afoot; or by voyaging up to the very
+end of one of the long arms of the sea that extend many miles inland.
+The latter involved dhows, dependence on uncertain winds, favourable
+tides, and a heap of good luck. It was less laborious but most
+uncertain. At this stage of the plan the hotel manager came forward with
+the offer of a gasoline launch, which we gladly accepted.
+
+We embarked about noon, storing our native carriers and effects aboard a
+dhow hired for the occasion. This we purposed towing. A very neatly
+uniformed Swahili bearing on his stomach a highly-polished brass label
+as big as a door plate--"Harbour Police"--threw duck fists over what he
+called overloading the boat. He knew very little about boats, but threw
+very competent duck fists. As we did know something about boats, we
+braved unknown consequences by disregarding him utterly. No consequences
+ensued--unless perhaps to his own health. When everything was aboard,
+that dhow was pretty well down, but still well afloat. Then we white men
+took our places in the launch.
+
+This was a long narrow affair with a four-cylinder thirty-horsepower
+engine. As she possessed no speed gears, she had either to plunge ahead
+full speed or come to a stop; there were no compromises. Her steering
+was managed by a tiller instead of a wheel, so that a mere touch
+sufficed to swerve her ten feet from her course. As the dhow was in no
+respects built on such nervous lines, she did occasionally some fancy
+and splashing curves.
+
+The pilot of the launch turned out to be a sandy-haired Yankee who had
+been catching wild animals for Barnum and Bailey's circus. While waiting
+for his ship, he, being a proverbial handy Yankee, had taken on this
+job. He became quite interested in telling us this, and at times forgot
+his duties at the tiller. Then that racing-launch would take a wild
+swoop; the clumsy old dhow astern would try vainly, with much spray and
+dangerous careening, to follow; the compromise course would all but
+upset her; the spray would fly; the safari boys would take their
+ducking; the boat boys would yell and dance and lean frantically against
+the two long sweeps with which they tried to steer. In this wild and
+untrammelled fashion we careered up the bay, too interested in our own
+performances to pay much attention to the scenery. The low shores, with
+their cocoanut groves gracefully rising above the mangrove tangle,
+slipped by, and the distant blue Shimba Hills came nearer.
+
+After a while we turned into a narrower channel with a good many curves
+and a quite unknown depth of water. Down this we whooped at the full
+speed of our thirty-horsepower engine. Occasional natives, waist deep
+and fishing, stared after us open-eyed. The Yankee ventured a guess as
+to how hard she would hit on a mudbank. She promptly proved his guess a
+rank underestimate by doing so. We fell in a heap on the bottom. The
+dhow bore down on us with majestic momentum. The boat boys leaned
+frantically on their sweeps, and managed just to avoid us. The dhow also
+rammed the mudbank. A dozen reluctant boys hopped overboard and pushed
+us off. We pursued our merry way again. On either hand now appeared fish
+weirs of plaited coco fibre; which, being planted in the shallows,
+helped us materially to guess at the channel. Naked men, up to their
+shoulders in the water, attended to some mysterious need of the nets, or
+emerged dripping and sparkling from the water with baskets of fish atop
+their heads. The channel grew even narrower, and the mudbanks more
+frequent. We dodged a dozen in our headlong course. Our local guide, a
+Swahili in tarboosh and a beautiful saffron robe, showed signs of strong
+excitement. We were to stop, he said, around the next bend; and at this
+rate we never could stop. The Yankee remarked, superfluously, that it
+would be handy if this dod-blistered engine had a clutch; adding, as an
+afterthought, that no matter how long he stayed in the tropics his nose
+peeled. We asked what we should do if we over-carried our prospective
+landing-place. He replied that the dod-blistered thing did have a
+reverse. While thus conversing we shot around a corner into a complete
+cul-de-sac! Everything was shut off hastily, and an instant later we and
+the dhow smashed up high and dry on a cozy mud beach! We drew a deep
+breath and looked around us.
+
+Mangrove thicket to the edge of the slimy ooze; trees behind--that was
+all we could see. We gave our attention to the business of getting our
+men, our effects, and ourselves ashore. The ooze proved to be just above
+knee deep. The porters had a fearful and floundering time, and received
+much obvious comment from us perched in the bow of the launch. Finally
+everything was debarked. F. and I took off our boots; but our gunbearers
+expressed such horror at the mere thought of our plunging into the mud,
+that we dutifully climbed them pick-a-back and were carried. The hard
+shell beach was a hundred feet away, occupying a little recess where the
+persistent tough mangroves drew back. From it led a narrow path through
+the thicket. We waved and shouted a farewell to the crews of the launch
+and the dhow.
+
+The path for a hundred feet was walled in by the mangroves through which
+scuttled and rattled the big land crabs. Then suddenly we found
+ourselves in a story-book tropical paradise. The tall coco palms rose
+tufted above everything; the fans of the younger palms waved below;
+bananas thrust the banners of their broad leaves wherever they could
+find space; creepers and vines flung the lush luxuriance of their
+greenery over all the earth and into the depths of all the half-guessed
+shadows. In no direction could one see unobstructed farther than twenty
+feet, except straight up; and there one could see just as far as the
+tops of the palms. It was like being in a room--a green, hot, steamy,
+lovely room. Very bright-coloured birds that ought really to have been
+at home in their cages fluttered about.
+
+We had much vigorous clearing to do to make room for our tents. By the
+time the job was finished we were all pretty hot. Several of the boys
+made vain attempts to climb for nuts, but without success. We had
+brought them with us from the interior, where cocoanuts do not grow; and
+they did not understand the method. They could swarm up the tall slim
+stems all right, but could not manage to get through the
+downward-pointing spikes of the dead leaves. F. tried and failed, to the
+great amusement of the men, but to the greater amusement of myself. I
+was a wise person, and lay on my back on a canvas cot, so it was not
+much bother to look up and enjoy life. Not to earn absolutely the stigma
+of laziness, I tried to shoot some nuts down. This did not work either,
+for the soft, spongy stems closed around the bullet holes. Then a little
+wizened monkey of a Swahili porter, having watched our futile
+performances with interest, nonchalantly swarmed up; in some mysterious
+manner he wriggled through the defences, and perched in the top, whence
+he dropped to us a dozen big green nuts. Our men may not have been much
+of a success at climbing for nuts; but they were passed masters at the
+art of opening them. Three or four clips from their awkward swordlike
+pangas, and we were each presented with a clean, beautiful, natural
+goblet brimming full of a refreshing drink.
+
+About this time a fine figure of a man drifted into camp. He was very
+smooth-skinned, very dignified, very venerable. He was pure Swahili,
+though of the savage branch of that race, and had none of the negro
+type of countenance. In fact, so like was he in face, hair, short square
+beard and genial dignity to a certain great-uncle of mine that it was
+very hard to remember that he had on only a small strip of cloth, that
+he was cherishing as a great treasure a piece of soap box he had
+salvaged from the shore, and that his skin was red chocolate. I felt
+inclined to talk to him as to an intellectual equal, especially as he
+had a fine resonant bass voice that in itself lent his remarks some
+importance. However, I gave him two ordinary wood screws, showed him how
+they screwed in and out, and left him happy.
+
+After supper the moon rose, casting shadows of new and unknown shapes
+through this strangely new and unknown forest. A thin white mist
+ascending everywhere from the soil tempered but could not obscure the
+white brilliance. The thermometer stood now only at 82 deg., but the
+dripping tropical sweat-bath in which our camp was pitched considerably
+raised the sensible heat. A bird with a most diabolical shrieking note
+cursed in the shadows. Another, a pigeon-like creature, began softly,
+and continued to repeat in diminishing energy until it seemed to have
+run down, like a piece of clockwork.
+
+Our way next morning led for some time through this lovely but damp
+jungle. Then we angled up the side of a hill to emerge into the
+comparatively open country atop what we Westerners would call a "hog's
+back"--a long narrow spurlike ridge mounting slowly to the general
+elevation of the main hills. Here were high green bushes, with little
+free open passages between them, and occasionally meadow-like openings
+running down the slopes on one side or the other. Before us, some miles
+distant, were the rounded blue hills.
+
+We climbed steadily. It was still very early morning, but already the
+day was hot. Pretty soon we saw over the jungle to the gleaming waters
+of the inlet, and then to the sea. Our "hog's back" led us past a ridge
+of the hills, and before we knew it we had been deposited in a shallow
+valley three or four miles wide between parallel ridges; the said valley
+being at a considerable elevation, and itself diversified with rolling
+hills, ravines, meadow land, and wide flats. On many of the ridges were
+scattered cocoanut palms, and occasional mango groves, while many smokes
+attested the presence of natives.
+
+These we found in shambas or groups of little farms, huddled all
+together, with wilderness and brush and trees, or the wide open green
+grass lawn between. The houses were very large and neat-looking. They
+were constructed quite ingeniously from coco branches. Each branch made
+one mat. The leaves were all brought over to the same side of the stem,
+and then plaited. The resulting mat was then six or seven feet long by
+from twelve to sixteen inches broad, and could be used for a variety of
+purposes. Indeed, we found Melville's chapter in "Typhee" as to the
+various uses of the cocoanut palm by no means exaggerated. The nuts,
+leaves, and fibre supplied every conceivable human want.
+
+The natives were a pleasant, friendly, good-looking lot. In fact, so
+like was their cast of countenance to that of the white-skinned people
+we were accustomed to see that we had great difficulty in realizing that
+they were mere savages, costume--or lack of it--to the contrary
+notwithstanding. Under a huge mango tree two were engaged in dividing a
+sheep. Sixty or seventy others stood solemnly around watching. It may
+have been a religious ceremony, for all I know; but the affair looked to
+be about two parts business to sixty of idle and cheerful curiosity. We
+stopped and talked to them a little, chaffed the pretty girls--they were
+really pretty--and marched on.
+
+About noon our elegant guide stopped, struck an attitude, and pointed
+with his silver-headed rattan cane.
+
+"This," said he, "is where we must camp."
+
+We marched through a little village. A family party sat beneath the
+veranda of a fine building--a very old wrinkled couple; two stalwart
+beautiful youths; a young mother suckling her baby; two young girls; and
+eight or ten miscellaneous and naked youngsters. As the rest of the
+village appeared to be empty, I imagined this to be the caretaker's
+family, and the youngsters to belong to others. We stopped and spoke,
+were answered cheerfully, suggested that we might like to buy chickens,
+and offered a price. Instantly with a whoop of joy the lot of them were
+afoot. The fowl waited for no further intimations of troublous times,
+but fled squawking. They had been there before. So had our hosts; for
+inside a minute they had returned, each with a chicken--and a broad
+grin.
+
+After due payment we proceeded on a few hundred yards, and pitched camp
+beneath two huge mango trees.
+
+Besides furnishing one of the most delicious of the tropical fruits,
+the mango is also one of the most beautiful of trees. It is tall,
+spreads very wide, and its branches sweep to within ten feet of the
+ground. Its perfect symmetry combined with the size and deep green of
+its leaves causes it to resemble, from a short distance, a beautiful
+green hill. Beneath its umbrella one finds dense shade, unmottled by a
+single ray of sunlight, so that one can lie under it in full confidence.
+For, parenthetically, even a single ray of this tropical sunlight is to
+the unprotected a very dangerous thing. But the leaves of the mango have
+this peculiarity, which distinguishes it from all other trees--namely,
+that they grow only at the very ends of the small twigs and branches. As
+these, of course, grow only at the ends of the big limbs, it follows
+that from beneath the mango looks like a lofty green dome, a veritable
+pantheon of the forest.
+
+We made our camp under one of these trees; gave ourselves all the space
+we could use; and had plenty left over--five tents and a cook camp, with
+no crowding. It was one of the pleasantest camps I ever saw. Our green
+dome overhead protected us absolutely from the sun; high sweet grass
+grew all about us; the breeze wandered lazily up from the distant
+Indian Ocean. Directly before our tent door the slope fell gently away
+through a sparse cocoanut grove whose straight stems panelled our view,
+then rose again to the clear-cut outline of a straight ridge opposite.
+The crest of this was sentinelled by tall scattered cocoanut trees, the
+"bursting star" pyrotechnic effect of their tops being particularly fine
+against the sky.
+
+After a five hours' tropical march uphill we were glad to sit under our
+green dome, to look at our view, to enjoy the little breeze, and to
+drink some of the cocoanuts our friends the villagers brought in.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[3] "The Land of Footprints."
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+THE SABLE.
+
+
+About three o'clock I began to feel rested and ambitious. Therefore I
+called up our elegant guide and Memba Sasa, and set out on my first hunt
+for sable. F. was rather more done up by the hard morning, and so did
+not go along. The guide wore still his red tarboosh, his dark short
+jacket, his saffron yellow nether garment--it was not exactly a
+skirt--and his silver-headed rattan cane. The only change he made was to
+tuck up the skirt, leaving his long legs bare. It hardly seemed
+altogether a suitable costume for hunting; but he seemed to know what he
+was about.
+
+We marched along ridges, and down into ravines, and across gulleys
+choked with brush. Horrible thickets alternated with and occasionally
+surrounded open green meadows hanging against the side hills. As we
+proceeded, the country became rougher, the ravines more precipitous. We
+struggled up steep hills, fairly bucking our way through low growth that
+proved all but impenetrable. The idea was to find a sable feeding in one
+of the little open glades; but whenever I allowed myself to think of the
+many adverse elements of the game, the chances seemed very slim. It took
+a half-hour to get from one glade to the next; there were thousands of
+glades. The sable is a rare shy animal that likes dense cover fully as
+well if not better than the open. Sheer rank bull luck alone seemed the
+only hope. And as I felt my strength going in that vicious struggle
+against heavy brush and steep hills, I began to have very strong doubts
+indeed as to that sable.
+
+For it was cruel, hard work. In this climate one hailed a car or a
+rickshaw to do an errand two streets away, and considered oneself quite
+a hero if one took a leisurely two-mile stroll along the cliff heads at
+sunset. Here I was, after a five-hour uphill march, bucking into brush
+and through country that would be considered difficult going even in
+Canada. At the end of twenty minutes my every garment was not wringing
+but dripping wet, so that when I carried my rifle over my arm water ran
+down the barrel and off the muzzle in a steady stream. After a bit of
+this my knees began to weaken; and it became a question of saving
+energy, of getting along somehow, and of leaving the actual hunting to
+Memba Sasa and the guide. If they had shown me a sable, I very much
+doubt if I could have hit it.
+
+However, we did not see one, and I staggered into camp at dusk pretty
+well exhausted. From the most grateful hot bath and clean clothes I
+derived much refreshment. Shortly I was sitting in my canvas chair,
+sipping a cocoanut, and describing the condition of affairs to F., who
+was naturally very curious as to how the trick was done.
+
+"Now," I concluded, "I know just about what I can and what I cannot do.
+Three days more of this sort of work will feed me up. If we do not run
+across a sable in that time, I'm afraid we don't get any."
+
+"Two days will do for me," said he.
+
+We called up the guide and questioned him closely. He seemed quite
+confident; and asserted that in this country sable were found, when they
+were found at all, which was not often. They must be discovered in the
+small grassy openings. We began to understand why so very few people get
+sable.
+
+We dismissed the guide, and sat quietly smoking in the warm soft
+evening. The air was absolutely still save for various night insects and
+birds, and the weird calling of natives across the valleys. Far out
+towards the sea a thunderstorm flashed; and after a long interval the
+rumblings came to us. So very distant was it that we paid it little
+attention, save as an interesting background to our own still evening.
+Almost between sentences of our slow conversation, however, it rushed up
+to the zenith, blotting out the stars. The tall palms began to sway and
+rustle in the forerunning breeze. Then with a swoop it was upon us, a
+tempest of fury. We turned in; and all night long the heavy deluges of
+rain fell, roaring like surf on an unfriendly coast.
+
+By morning this had fallen to a light, steady drizzle in which we
+started off quite happily. In this climate one likes to get wet. The
+ground was sodden and deep with muck. Within a mile of camp we saw many
+fresh buffalo tracks.
+
+This time we went downhill and still downhill through openings among
+batches of great forest trees. The new leaves were just coming out in
+pinks and russets, so that the effect at a little distance was almost
+precisely that of our autumn foliage in its duller phases. So familiar
+were made some of the low rounded knolls that for an instant we were
+respectively back in the hills of Surrey or Michigan, and told each
+other so.
+
+Thus we moved slowly out from the dense cover to the grass openings. Far
+over on another ridge F. called my attention to something jet-black and
+indeterminate. In another country I should have named it as a charred
+log on an old pine burning, for that was precisely what it looked like.
+We glanced at it casually through our glasses. It was a sable buck lying
+down right out in the open. He was black and sleek, and we could make
+out his sweeping scimitar horns.
+
+Memba Sasa and the Swahili dropped flat on their faces while F. and I
+crawled slowly and cautiously through the mud until we had gained the
+cover of a shallow ravine that ran in the beast's general direction.
+Noting carefully a certain small thicket as landmark, we stooped and
+moved as fast as we could down to that point of vantage. There we
+cautiously parted the grasses and looked. The sable had disappeared. The
+place where he had been lying was plainly to be identified, and there
+was no cover save a tiny bush between two and three feet high. We were
+quite certain he had neither seen nor winded us. Either he had risen
+and fled forward into the ravine up which we had made our stalk, or else
+he had entered the small thicket. F. agreed to stay on watch where he
+was, while I slipped back and examined the earth to leeward of the
+thicket.
+
+I had hardly crawled ten yards, however, before the gentle snapping of
+F.'s fingers recalled me to his side.
+
+"He's behind that bush," he whispered in my ear.
+
+I looked. The bush was hardly large enough to conceal a setter dog, and
+the sable is somewhat larger than our elk. Nevertheless F. insisted that
+the animal was standing behind it, and that he had caught the toss of
+its head. We lay still for some time, while the soft, warm rain drizzled
+down on us, our eyes riveted on the bush. And then we caught the
+momentary flash of curved horns as the sable tossed his head. It seemed
+incredible even then that the tiny bush should conceal so large a beast.
+As a matter of fact we later found that the bush grew on a slight
+elevation, behind which was a depression. In this the sable stood,
+patiently enduring the drizzle.
+
+We waited some time in hopes he would move forward a foot or so; but
+apparently he had selected his loafing place with care, and liked it.
+The danger of a shift of wind was always present. Finally I slipped back
+over the brink of the ravine, moved three yards to the left, and crawled
+up through the tall dripping grass to a new position behind a little
+bush. Cautiously raising my head, I found I could see plainly the
+sable's head and part of his shoulders. My position was cramped and out
+of balance for offhand shooting; but I did my best, and heard the loud
+plunk of the hit. The sable made off at a fast though rather awkward
+gallop, wheeled for an instant a hundred yards farther on, received
+another bullet in the shoulder, and disappeared over the brow of the
+hill. We raced over the top to get in another shot, and found him stone
+dead.
+
+He was a fine beast, jet-black in coat, with white markings on the face,
+red-brown ears, and horns sweeping up and back scimitar fashion. He
+stood four feet and six inches at the shoulder, and his horns were the
+second best ever shot in British East Africa. This beast has been
+described by Heller as a new subspecies, and named Rooseveltii. His
+description was based upon an immature buck and a doe shot by Kermit
+Roosevelt. The determination of subspecies on so slight evidence seems
+to me unscientific in the extreme. While the immature males do exhibit
+the general brown tone relied on by Mr. Heller, the mature buck differs
+in no essential from the tropical sable. I find the alledged subspecies
+is not accepted by European scientists.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+A MARCH ALONG THE COAST.
+
+
+With a most comfortable feeling that my task was done, that suddenly the
+threatening clouds of killing work had been cleared up, I was now
+privileged to loaf and invite my soul on this tropical green hilltop
+while poor F. put in the days trying to find another sable. Every
+morning he started out before daylight. I could see the light of his
+lantern outside the tent; and I stretched myself in the luxurious
+consciousness that I should hear no deprecating but insistent "hodie"
+from my boy until I pleased to invite it. In the afternoon or evening F.
+would return, quite exhausted and dripping, with only the report of new
+country traversed. No sable; no tracks of sable; no old signs, even, of
+sable. Gradually it was borne in on me how lucky I was to have come upon
+my magnificent specimen so promptly and in such favourable
+circumstances.
+
+A leisurely breakfast alone, with the sun climbing; then the writing of
+notes, a little reading, and perhaps a stroll to the village or along
+the top of the ridge. At the heat of noon a siesta with a cool cocoanut
+at my elbow. The view was beautiful on all sides; our great tree full of
+birds; the rising and dying winds in the palms like the gathering
+oncoming rush of the rains. From mountain to mountain sounded the wild,
+far-carrying ululations of the natives, conveying news or messages
+across the wide jungle. Towards sunset I wandered out in the groves,
+enjoying the many bright flowers, the tall, sweet grasses, and the
+cocoa-palms against the sky. Piles of cocoanuts lay on the ground,
+covered each with a leaf plaited in a peculiarly individual manner to
+indicate ownership. Small boys, like little black imps, clung naked
+half-way up the slim trunks of the palms, watching me bright-eyed above
+the undergrowth. In all directions, crossing and recrossing, ran a maze
+of beaten paths. Each led somewhere, but it would require the memory
+of--well, of a native, to keep all their destinations in mind.
+
+I used to follow some of them to their ending in little cocoa-leaf
+houses on the tops of knolls or beneath mangoes; and would talk with the
+people. They were very grave and very polite, and seemed to be living
+out their lives quite correctly according to their conceptions. Again,
+it was borne in on me that these people are not stumbling along the
+course of evolution in our footsteps, but have gone as far in their path
+as we have in ours; that they have reached at least as complete a
+correspondence with their environment as we with our own.[4]
+
+If F. had not returned by the time I reached camp, I would seat myself
+in my canvas chair, and thence dispense justice, advice, or medical
+treatment. If none of these things seemed demanded, I smoked my pipe. To
+me one afternoon came a big-framed, old, dignified man, with the heavy
+beard, the noble features, the high forehead, and the blank statue eyes
+of the blind Homer. He was led by a very small, very bright-eyed naked
+boy. At some twenty feet distance he squatted down cross-legged before
+me. For quite five minutes he sat there silent, while I sat in my camp
+chair, smoked and waited. At last he spoke in a rolling deep bass voice
+rich and vibrating--a delight to hear.
+
+"Jambo (greeting)!" said he.
+
+"Jambo!" I replied mildly.
+
+Again a five-minute silence. I had begun reading, and had all but
+forgotten his presence.
+
+"Jambo bwana (greeting, master)!" he rolled out.
+
+"Jambo!" I repeated.
+
+The same dignified, unhasting pause.
+
+"Jambo bwana m'kubwa (greeting, great master)!"
+
+"Jambo!" quoth I, and went on reading. The sun was dropping, but the old
+man seemed in no hurry.
+
+"Jambo bwana m'kubwa sana (greeting, most mighty master)!" he boomed at
+last.
+
+"Jambo!" said I.
+
+This would seem to strike the superlative, and I expected now that he
+would state his business, but the old man had one more shot in his
+locker.
+
+"Jambo bwana m'kubwa kabeesa sana (greeting, mightiest possible
+master)!" it came.
+
+Then in due course he delicately hinted that a gift of tobacco would not
+come amiss.
+
+F. returned a trifle earlier than usual, to admit that his quest was
+hopeless, that his physical forces were for the time being at an end,
+and that he was willing to go home.
+
+Accordingly very early next morning we set out by the glimmer of a
+lantern, hoping to get a good start on our journey before the heat of
+the day became too severe. We did gain something, but performed several
+unnecessary loops and semicircles in the maze of beaten paths before we
+finally struck into one that led down the slope towards the sea. Shortly
+after the dawn came up "like thunder" in its swiftness, followed almost
+immediately by the sun.
+
+Our way now led along the wide flat between the seashore and the Shimba
+Hills, in which we had been hunting. A road ten feet wide and innocent
+of wheels ran with obstinate directness up and down the slight contours
+and through the bushes and cocoanut groves that lay in its path. So
+mathematically straight was it that only when perspective closed it in,
+or when it dropped over the summit of a little rise, did the eye lose
+the effect of its interminability. The country through which this road
+led was various--open bushy veld with sparse trees, dense jungle,
+cocoanut groves, tall and cool. In the shadows of the latter were the
+thatched native villages. To the left always ran the blue Shimba Hills;
+and far away to the right somewhere we heard the grumbling of the sea.
+
+Every hundred yards or so we met somebody. Even thus early the road was
+thronged. By far the majority were the almost naked natives of the
+district, pleasant, brown-skinned people with good features. They
+carried things. These things varied from great loads balanced atop to
+dainty impromptu baskets woven of cocoa-leaves and containing each a
+single cocoanut. They smiled on us, returned our greeting, and stood
+completely aside to let us pass. Other wayfarers were of more
+importance. Small groups of bearded dignitaries, either upper-class
+Swahili or pure Arabs, strolled slowly along, apparently with limitless
+leisure, but evidently bound somewhere, nevertheless. They replied to
+our greetings with great dignity. Once, also, we overtook a small
+detachment of Sudanese troops moving. They were scattered over several
+miles of road. A soldier, most impressive and neat in khaki and red
+tarboosh and sash; then two or three of his laughing, sleek women, clad
+in the thin, patterned "'Mericani," glittering with gold ornaments; then
+a half dozen ragged porters carrying official but battered painted
+wooden kit boxes, or bags, or miscellaneous curious plunder; then more
+troopers; and so on for miles. They all drew aside for us most
+respectfully; and the soldiers saluted, very smart and military.
+
+Under the broad-spreading mangoes near the villages we came upon many
+open markets in full swing. Each vendor squatted on his heels behind his
+wares, while the purchasers or traders wandered here and there making
+offers. The actual commerce compared with the amount of laughing,
+joking, shrieking joy of the occasion as one to a thousand.
+
+Generally three or four degenerate looking dirty East Indians slunk
+about, very crafty, very insinuating, very ready and skilful to take
+what advantages they could. I felt a strong desire to kick every one of
+them out from these joyful concourses of happy people. Generally we sat
+down for a while in these markets, and talked to the people a little,
+and perhaps purchased some of the delicious fruit. They had a small
+delicate variety of banana, most wonderful, the like of which I have
+seen nowhere else. We bought forty of these for a coin worth about eight
+cents. Besides fruit they offered cocoanuts in all forms, grain, woven
+baskets, small articles of handicraft--and fish. The latter were farther
+from the sea than they should have been! These occasional halts greatly
+refreshed us for more of that endless road.
+
+For all this time we were very hot. As the sun mounted, the country
+fairly steamed. From the end of my rifle barrel, which I carried across
+my forearm, a steady trickle of water dripped into the road. We neither
+of us had a dry stitch on us, and our light garments clung to us
+thoroughly wet through. At first we tried the military method, and
+marched fifty minutes to rest ten, but soon discovered that twenty-five
+minutes' work to five minutes off was more practical. The sheer weight
+of the sun was terrific; after we had been exposed to it for any great
+length of time--as across several wide open spaces--we entered the
+steaming shade of the jungle with gratitude. At the end of seven hours,
+however, we most unexpectedly came through a dense cocoanut grove plump
+on the banks of the harbour at Kilindini.
+
+Here, after making arrangements for the transport of our safari, when it
+should arrive, we entrusted ourselves to a small boy and a cranky boat.
+An hour later, clad in tropical white, with cool drinks at our elbows,
+we sat in easy-chairs on the veranda of the Mombasa Club.
+
+The clubhouse is built on a low cliff at the water's edge. It looks
+across the blue waters of the bay to a headland crowned with
+cocoa-palms, and beyond the headland to the Indian Ocean. The cool
+trades sweep across that veranda. We idly watched a lone white oarsman
+pulling strongly against the wind through the tide rips, evidently bent
+on exercise. We speculated on the incredible folly of wanting exercise;
+and forgot him. An hour later a huge saffron yellow squall rose from
+China 'cross the way, filled the world with an unholy light, lashed the
+reluctant sea to white-caps, and swooped screaming on the cocoa-palms.
+Police boats to rescue the idiot oarsman! Much minor excitement! Great
+rushing to and fro! We continued to sit in our lounging chairs, one hand
+on our cool long drinks.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[4] For a fuller discussion, see "The Land of Footprints."
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+THE FIRE.
+
+
+We were very tired, so we turned in early. W Unfortunately, our rooms
+were immediately over the billiard room, where a bibulous and
+cosmopolitan lot were earnestly endeavouring to bolster up by further
+proof the fiction that a white man cannot retain his health in the
+tropics. The process was pretty rackety, and while it could not keep us
+awake, it prevented us from falling thoroughly asleep. At length, and
+suddenly, the props of noise fell away from me, and I sank into a
+grateful, profound abyss.
+
+Almost at once, however, I was dragged back to consciousness. Mohammed
+stood at my bedside.
+
+"Bwana," he proffered to my rather angry inquiry, "all the people have
+gone to the fire. It is a very large fire. I thought you would like to
+see it."
+
+I glanced out of the window at the reddening sky, thrust my feet into a
+pair of slippers, and went forth in my pyjamas to see what I could see.
+
+We threaded our way through many narrow dark and deserted streets,
+beneath balconies that overhung, past walls over which nodded tufted
+palms, until a loud and increasing murmuring told us we were nearing the
+centre of disturbance. Shortly, we came to the outskirts of the excited
+crowd, and beyond them saw the red furnace glow.
+
+"Semeelay! Semeelay!" warned Mohammed authoritatively; and the
+bystanders, seeing a white face, gave me passage.
+
+All of picturesque Mombasa was afoot--Arabs, Swahilis, Somalis, savages,
+Indians--the whole lot. They moved restlessly in the narrow streets;
+they hung over the edges of balconies; they peered from barred windows;
+interested dark faces turned up everywhere in the flickering light. One
+woman, a fine, erect, biblical figure, stood silhouetted on a flat
+housetop and screamed steadily. I thought she must have at least one
+baby in the fire, but it seems she was only excited.
+
+The fire was at present confined to two buildings, in which it was
+raging fiercely. Its spread, however, seemed certain; and, as it was
+surrounded by warehouses of valuable goods, moving was in full swing. A
+frantic white man stood at the low doorway of one of these dungeon-like
+stores hastening the movements of an unending string of porters. As each
+emerged bearing a case on his shoulder, the white man urged him to a
+trot. I followed up the street to see where these valuables were being
+taken, and what were the precautions against theft. Around the next
+corner, it seemed. As each excited perspiring porter trotted up, he
+heaved his burden from his head or his shoulders, and promptly scampered
+back for another load. They were loyal and zealous men; but their
+headpieces were deficient inside. For the burdens that they saved from
+the fire happened to be cases of gin in bottles. At least, it was in
+bottles until the process of saving had been completed. Then it trickled
+merrily down the gutter. I went back and told the frantic white man
+about it. He threw up both hands to heaven and departed.
+
+By dodging from street to street Mohammed and I succeeded in circling
+the whole disturbance, and so came at length to a public square. Here
+was a vast throng, and a very good place, so I climbed atop a rescued
+bale of cotton the better to see.
+
+Mombasa has no water system, but a wonderful corps of water-carriers.
+These were in requisition to a man. They disappeared down through the
+wide gates of the customs enclosure, their naked, muscular, light-brown
+bodies gleaming with sweat, their Standard Oil cans dangling merrily at
+the ends of slender poles. A moment later they emerged, the cans full of
+salt water from the bay, the poles seeming fairly to butt into their
+bare shoulders as they teetered along at their rapid, swaying, burdened
+gait.
+
+The moment they entered the square they were seized upon from a dozen
+different sides. There was no system at all. Every owner of property was
+out for himself, and intended to get as much of the precious water as he
+could. The poor carriers were pulled about, jerked violently here and
+there, besought, commanded, to bring their loads to one or the other of
+the threatened premises. Vociferations, accusations, commands arose to
+screams. One old graybeard occupied himself by standing on tiptoe and
+screeching, "Maji! maji! maji!" at the top of his voice, as though that
+added anything to the visible supply. The water-carrier of the moment
+disappeared in a swirl of excited contestants. He was attending strictly
+to business, looking neither to right nor to left, pushing forward as
+steadily as he could, gasping mechanically his customary warning,
+"Semeelay! Semeelay!" Somehow, eventually, he and his comrades must have
+got somewhere; for after an interval he returned with empty buckets.
+Then every blessed fool of a property owner took a whack at his bare
+shoulders as he passed, shrieking hysterically, "Haya! haya! pesi!
+pesi!" and the like to men already doing their best. It was a grand
+sight!
+
+In the meantime the fire itself was roaring away. The old graybeard
+suddenly ceased crying "maji," and darted forward to where I stood on
+the bale of cotton. With great but somewhat flurried respect he begged
+me to descend. I did so, somewhat curious as to what he might be up to,
+for the cotton was at least two hundred feet from the fire. Immediately
+he began to tug and heave; the bale was almost beyond his strength; but
+after incredible exertions he lifted one side of it, poised it for a
+moment, got his shoulder under it, and rolled it over once. Then he
+darted away and resumed his raucous cry for water. I climbed back again.
+Thrice more, at intervals, he repeated this performance. The only result
+was to daub with mud every possible side of that bale. I hope it was his
+property.
+
+You must remember that I was observing the heavy artillery of the attack
+on the conflagration. Individual campaigns were everywhere in progress.
+I saw one man standing on the roof of a threatened building. He lowered
+slowly, hand over hand, a small tea-kettle at the end of a string. This
+was filled by a friend in the street, whereupon the man hauled it up
+again, slowly, hand over hand, and solemnly dashed its contents into the
+mouth of the furnace. Thousands of other men on roofs, in balconies, on
+the street, were doing the same thing. Some had ordinary cups which they
+filled a block away! The limit of efficiency was a pail. Nobody did
+anything in concert with anybody else. The sight of these thousands of
+little midgets each with his teacup, or his teapot, or his tin pail,
+throwing each his mite of water--for which he had to walk a street or
+so--into the ravening roaring furnace of flame was as pathetic or as
+comical as you please. They did not seem to have a show in the world.
+
+Nevertheless, to my vast surprise, the old system of the East triumphed
+at last. The system of the East is that if you get _enough_ labour you
+can accomplish anything. Little by little those thousands of tea kettles
+of water had their aggregate effect. The flames fed themselves out and
+died down leaving the contiguous buildings unharmed save for a little
+scorching. In two hours all was safe, and I returned to the hotel,
+having enjoyed myself hugely. I had, however, in the interest and
+excitement, forgotten how deadly is the fever of Mombasa. Midnight in
+pyjamas did the business; and shortly I paid well for the fun.
+
+
+
+
+PART III.
+
+NAIROBI.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+UP FROM THE COAST.
+
+
+Nairobi is situated at the far edge of the great Athi Plains and just
+below a range of hills. It might about as well have been anywhere else,
+and perhaps better a few miles back in the higher country. Whether the
+funny little narrow-gauge railroad exists for Nairobi, or Nairobi for
+the railroad, it would be difficult to say. Between Mombasa and this
+interior placed-to-order town, certainly, there is nothing, absolutely
+nothing, either in passengers or freight, to justify building the line.
+That distance is, if I remember it correctly, about three hundred and
+twenty miles. A dozen or so names of stations appear on the map. These
+are water tanks, telegraph stations, or small groups of tents in which
+dwell black labourers--on the railroad.
+
+The way climbs out from the tropical steaming coast belt to and across
+the high scrub desert, and then through lower rounded hills to the
+plains. On the desert is only dense thorn brush--and a possibility that
+the newcomer, if he looks very closely, may to his excitement see his
+first game in Africa. This is a stray duiker or so, tiny grass antelopes
+a foot high. Also in this land is thirst; so that alongside the
+locomotives, as they struggle up grade, in bad seasons, run natives to
+catch precious drops.[5] An impalpable red dust sifts through and into
+everything. When a man descends at Voi for dinner he finds his
+fellow-travellers have changed complexion. The pale clerk from indoor
+Mombasa has put on a fine healthy sunburn; and the company in general
+present a rich out-of-doors bloom. A chance dab with a white napkin
+comes away like fresh paint, however.
+
+You clamber back into the compartment, with its latticed sun shades and
+its smoked glass windows; you let down the narrow canvas bunk; you
+unfold your rug, and settle yourself for repose. It is a difficult
+matter. Everything you touch is gritty. The air is close and stifling,
+like the smoke-charged air of a tunnel. If you try to open a window you
+are suffocated with more of the red dust. At last you fall into a doze;
+to awaken nearly frozen! The train has climbed into what is, after weeks
+of the tropics, comparative cold; and if you have not been warned to
+carry wraps, you are in danger of pneumonia.
+
+The gray dawn comes, and shortly, in the sudden tropical fashion, the
+full light. You look out on a wide smiling grass country, with dips and
+swales, and brushy river bottoms, and long slopes and hills thrusting up
+in masses from down below the horizon, and singly here and there in the
+immensities nearer at hand. The train winds and doubles on itself up the
+gentle slopes and across the imperceptibly rising plains. But the
+interest is not in these wide prospects, beautiful and smiling as they
+may be, but in the game. It is everywhere. Far in the distance the herds
+twinkle, half guessed in the shimmer of the bottom lands or dotting the
+sides of the hills. Nearer at hand it stares as the train rumbles and
+sways laboriously past. Occasionally it even becomes necessary to
+whistle aside some impertinent kongoni that has placed himself between
+the metals! The newcomer has but a theoretical knowledge at best of all
+these animals; and he is intensely interested in identifying the various
+species. The hartebeeste and the wildebeeste he learns quickly enough,
+and of course the zebra and the giraffe are unmistakable; but the
+smaller gazelles are legitimate subjects for discussion. The wonder of
+the extraordinary abundance of these wild animals mounts as the hours
+slip by. At the stops for water or for orders the passengers gather from
+their different compartments to detail excitedly to each other what they
+have seen. There is always an honest superenthusiast who believes he has
+seen rhinoceroses, lions, or leopards. He is looked upon with envy by
+the credulous, and with exasperation by all others.
+
+So the little train puffs and tugs along. Suddenly it happens on a
+barbed wire fence, and immediately after enters the town of Nairobi. The
+game has persisted right up to that barbed wire fence.
+
+The station platform is thronged with a heterogeneous multitude of
+people. The hands of a dozen raggetty black boys are stretched out for
+luggage. The newcomer sees with delight a savage with a tin can in his
+stretched ear lobe; another with a set of wooden skewers set fanwise
+around the edge of the ear; he catches a glimpse of a beautiful naked
+creature very proud, very decorated with beads and heavy polished wire.
+Then he is ravished away by the friend, or agent, or hotel
+representative who has met him, and hurried out through the gates
+between the impassive and dignified Sikh sentries to the cab. I believe
+nobody but the newcomer ever rides in the cab; and then but once, from
+the station to the hotel. After that he uses rickshaws. In fact it is
+probable that the cab is maintained for the sole purpose of giving the
+newcomer a grand and impressive entrance. This brief fleeting quarter
+hour of glory is unique and passes. It is like crossing the Line, or the
+first kiss, something that in its nature cannot be repeated.
+
+The cab was once a noble vehicle, compounded of opulent curves, with a
+very high driver's box in front, a little let-down bench, and a deep,
+luxurious, shell-shaped back seat, reclining in which one received the
+adulation of the populace. That was in its youth. Now in its age the
+varnish is gone; the upholstery of the back seat frayed; the upholstery
+of the small seat lacking utterly, so that one sits on bare boards. In
+place of two dignifiedly spirited fat white horses, it is drawn by two
+very small mules in a semi-detached position far ahead. And how it
+rattles!
+
+Between the station and the hotel at Nairobi is a long straight wide
+well-made street, nearly a mile long, and bordered by a double row of
+young eucalyptus. These latter have changed the main street of Nairobi
+from the sunbaked array of galvanized houses described by travellers of
+a half dozen years back to a thoroughfare of great charm. The iron
+houses and stores are now in a shaded background; and the attention is
+freed to concentrate on the vivid colouring, the incessant movement, the
+great interest of the people moving to and fro. When I left Nairobi the
+authorities were considering the removal of these trees, because one row
+of them had been planted slightly within the legal limits of the street.
+What they could interfere with in a practically horseless town I cannot
+imagine, but I trust this stupidity gave way to second thought.
+
+The cab rattles and careers up the length of the street, scattering
+rickshaws and pedestrians from before its triumphant path. To the left
+opens a wide street of little booths under iron awnings, hung with gay
+colour and glittering things. The street is thronged from side to side
+with natives of all sorts. It whirls past, and shortly after the cab
+dashes inside a fence and draws up before the low stone-built,
+wide-verandahed hotel.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[5] The Government does much nowadays by means of tank cars.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+A TOWN OF CONTRASTS.
+
+
+It has been, as I have said, the fashion to speak of Nairobi as an ugly
+little town. This was probably true when the first corrugated iron
+houses huddled unrelieved near the railway station. It is not true now.
+The lower part of town is well planted, and is always picturesque as
+long as its people are astir. The white population have built in the
+wooded hills some charming bungalows surrounded by bright flowers or
+lost amid the trunks of great trees. From the heights on which is
+Government House one can, with a glass, watch the game herds feeding on
+the plains. Two clubs, with the usual games of golf, polo,
+tennis--especially tennis--football and cricket; a weekly hunt, with
+jackals instead of foxes; a bungalow town club on the slope of a hill;
+an electric light system; a race track; a rifle range; frilly parasols
+and the latest fluffiest summer toilettes from London and Paris--I
+mention a few of the refinements of civilization that offer to the
+traveller some of the most piquant of contrasts.
+
+For it must not be forgotten that Nairobi, in spite of these things--due
+to the direct but slender thread of communication by railroad and
+ships--is actually in the middle of an African wilderness--is a black
+man's town, as far as numbers go.[6]
+
+The game feeds to its very outskirts, even wanders into the streets at
+night.[7] Lions may be heard roaring within a mile or so of town; and
+leopards occasionally at night come on the verandas of the outlying
+dwellings. Naked savages from the jungle untouched by civilization in
+even the minutest particular wander the streets unabashed.
+
+It is this constantly recurring, sharply drawn contrast that gives
+Nairobi its piquant charm. As one sits on the broad hotel veranda a
+constantly varied pageant passes before him. A daintily dressed,
+fresh-faced Englishwoman bobs by in a smart rickshaw drawn by two
+uniformed runners; a Kikuyu, anointed, curled, naked, brass adorned,
+teeters along, an expression of satisfaction on his face; a horseman,
+well appointed, trots briskly by followed by his loping syce; a string
+of skin-clad women, their heads fantastically shaved, heavily
+ornamented, lean forward under the burden of firewood for the market; a
+beautiful baby in a frilled perambulator is propelled by a tall, solemn,
+fine-looking black man in white robe and cap; the driver of a high cart
+tools his animal past a creaking, clumsy, two-wheeled wagon drawn by a
+pair of small humpbacked native oxen. And so it goes, all day long,
+without end. The public rickshaw boys just across the way chatter and
+game and quarrel and keep a watchful eye out for a possible patron on
+whom to charge vociferously and full tilt. Two or three old-timers with
+white whiskers and red faces continue to slaughter thousands and
+thousands and thousands of lions from the depths of their easy chairs.
+
+The stone veranda of that hotel is a very interesting place. Here gather
+men from all parts of East Africa, from Uganda, and the jungles of the
+Upper Congo. At one time or another all the famous hunters drop into its
+canvas chairs--Cunninghame, Allan Black, Judd, Outram, Hoey, and the
+others; white traders with the natives of distant lands; owners of farms
+experimenting bravely on a greater or lesser scale in a land whose
+difficulties are just beginning to be understood; great naturalists and
+scientists from the governments of the earth, eager to observe and
+collect this interesting and teeming fauna; and sportsmen just out and
+full of interest, or just returned and modestly important. More
+absorbing conversation can be listened to on this veranda than in any
+other one place in the world. The gathering is cosmopolitan; it is
+representative of the most active of every social, political, and racial
+element; it has done things; it contemplates vital problems from the
+vantage ground of experience. The talk veers from pole to pole--and
+returns always to lions.
+
+Every little while a native--a raw savage--comes along and takes up a
+stand just outside the railing. He stands there mute and patient for
+five minutes--a half hour--until some one, any one, happens to notice
+him.
+
+"N'jo!--come here!" commands this person.
+
+The savage silently proffers a bit of paper on which is written the name
+of the one with whom he has business.
+
+"Nenda officie!" indicates the charitable person waving his hand
+towards the hotel office.
+
+Then, and not until this permission has been given by some one, dares
+the savage cross the threshold to do his errand.
+
+If the messenger happens to be a trained houseboy, however, dressed in
+his uniform of khaki or his more picturesque white robe and cap, he is
+privileged to work out his own salvation. And behind the hotel are rows
+and rows of other boys, each waiting patiently the pleasure of his
+especial bwana lounging at ease after strenuous days. At the drawling
+shout of "boy!" one of them instantly departs to find out which
+particular boy is wanted.
+
+The moment any white man walks to the edge of the veranda a half-dozen
+of the rickshaws across the street career madly around the corners of
+the fence, bumping, colliding, careening dangerously, to drop
+beseechingly in serried confusion close around the step. The rickshaw
+habit is very strong in Nairobi. If a man wants to go a hundred yards
+down the street he takes a rickshaw for that stupendous journey. There
+is in justification the legend that the white man should not exert
+himself in the tropics. I fell into the custom of the country until I
+reflected that it would hardly be more fatal to me to walk a half-hour
+in the streets of Nairobi than to march six or seven hours--as I often
+did--when on safari or in the hunting field. After that I got a little
+exercise, to the vast scandal of the rickshaw boys. In fact, so unusual
+was my performance that at first I had fairly to clear myself a way with
+my kiboko. After a few experiences they concluded me a particularly
+crazy person and let me alone.
+
+Rickshaws, however, are very efficient and very cheap. The runners, two
+in number, are lithe little round-headed Kavirondos, generally, their
+heads shaved to leave a skull cap, clad in scant ragged garments, and
+wearing each an anklet of little bells. Their passion for ornament they
+confine to small bright things in their hair and ears. They run easily,
+with a very long stride. Even steep hills they struggle up somehow,
+zigzagging from one side of the road to the other, edging along an inch
+or so at a time. In such places I should infinitely have preferred to
+have walked, but that would have lost me caste everywhere. There are
+limits even to a crazy man's idiosyncrasies. For that reason I never
+thoroughly enjoyed rickshaws, save along the level ways with bells
+jingling and feet patpatting a rapid time. Certainly I did not enjoy
+them going down the steep hills. The boy between the shafts in front
+hits the landscape about every forty feet. I do not really object to
+sudden death, but this form of it seemed unfair to some poor hungry
+lion.
+
+However, the winding smooth roads among the forested, shaded bungalows
+of the upper part of town were very attractive, especially towards
+evening. At that time the universal sun-helmet or double terai could be
+laid aside for straw hats, cloth caps, or bare heads. People played the
+more violent games, or strolled idly. At the hotel there was now a good
+deal of foolish drinking; foolish, because in this climate it is very
+bad for the human system, and in these surroundings of much interest and
+excitement the relief of its exaltation from monotony or ennui or
+routine could hardly be required.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[6] Fifteen hundred whites to twelve thousand natives, approximately.
+
+[7] This happened twice while I was in the country.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+PEOPLE.
+
+
+Considered as a class rather than as individuals, the dark-skinned
+population is easily the more interesting. Considered as individuals,
+the converse is true. Men like Sir Percy Girouard, Hobley, Jackson, Lord
+Delamere, McMillan, Cunninghame, Allan Black, Leslie Tarleton,
+Vanderweyer, the Hill cousins, Horne, and a dozen others are nowhere
+else to be met in so small a community. But the whites have developed
+nothing in their relations one to another essentially different. The
+artisan and shopkeeping class dwell on the flats; the Government people
+and those of military connections live on the heights on one side of the
+little stream; the civil service and bigger business men among the hills
+on the other. Between them all is a little jealousy, and contempt, and
+condescension; just as there is jealousy, and contempt, and
+condescension elsewhere. They are pleasant people, and hospitable, and
+some of them very distinguished in position or achievement; and I am
+glad to say I have good friends among them.
+
+But the native is the joy, and the never-ceasing delight. For his
+benefit is the wide, glittering, colourful, insanitary bazaar, with its
+dozens of little open-air veranda shops, its "hotels" where he can sit
+in a real chair and drink real tea, its cafes, and the dark mysteries of
+its more doubtful amusements. The bazaar is right in the middle of town,
+just where it ought not to be, and it is constantly being quarantined,
+and threatened with removal. It houses a large population mysteriously,
+for it is of slight extent. Then on the borders of town are the two
+great native villages--one belonging to the Somalis, and the other
+hospitably accommodating the swarms of caravan porters and their
+families. For, just as in old days Mombasa and Zanzibar used to be the
+points from which caravans into the interior would set forth, now
+Nairobi outfits the majority of expeditions. Probably ten thousand
+picked natives of various tribes are engaged in the profession. Of
+course but a small proportion of this number is ever at home at any one
+time; but the village is a large one. Both these villages are built in
+the native style, of plaster and thatch; have their own headman
+government--under supervision--and are kept pretty well swept out and
+tidy. Besides these three main gathering places are many camps and
+"shambas"[8] scattered everywhere; and the back country counts millions
+of raw jungle savages, only too glad to drift in occasionally for a look
+at the metropolis.
+
+At first the newcomer is absolutely bewildered by the variety of these
+peoples; but after a little he learns to differentiate. The Somalis are
+perhaps the first recognizable, with their finely chiselled,
+intelligent, delicate brown features, their slender forms, and their
+strikingly picturesque costumes of turbans, flowing robes, and
+embroidered sleeveless jackets. Then he learns to distinguish the savage
+from the sophisticated dweller of the town. Later comes the
+identification of the numerous tribes.
+
+The savage comes in just as he has been for, ethnologists alone can
+guess, how many thousands of years. He is too old an institution to have
+been affected as yet by this tiny spot of modernity in the middle of the
+wilderness. As a consequence he startles the newcomer even more than
+the sight of giraffes on the sky-line.
+
+When the shenzi--wild man--comes to town he gathers in two or three of
+his companions, and presents himself as follows: His hair has been grown
+quite long, then gathered in three tight pigtails wound with leather,
+one of which hangs over his forehead, and the other two over his ears.
+The entire head he has then anointed with a mixture of castor oil and a
+bright red colouring earth. This is wiped away evenly all around the
+face, about two inches below the hair, to leave a broad, bandlike
+glistening effect around the entire head. The ears are most marvellous.
+From early youth the lobes have been stretched, until at last they have
+become like two long elastic loops, hanging down upon the shoulder, and
+capable of accommodating anything up to and including a tomato can. When
+in fatigue uniform these loops are caught up over the tops of the ears,
+but on dress parade they accommodate almost anything considered
+ornamental. I have seen a row of safety pins clasped in them or a number
+of curtain rings; or a marmalade jar, or the glittering cover of a
+tobacco tin. The edges of the ears, all around to the top, are then
+pierced. Then the insertion of a row of long white wooden skewers gives
+one a peculiarly porcupinish look; or a row of little brass danglers
+hints of wealth. Having thus finished off his head, your savage clasps
+around his neck various strings of beads; or collars of iron or copper
+wire, polished to the point of glitter; puts on a half-dozen armlets and
+leglets of the same; ties on a narrow bead belt, in which is thrust a
+short sword; anoints himself all over with reddened castor oil until he
+glistens and shines in the sun; rubs his legs with white clay and traces
+patterns therein; seizes his long-bladed spear, and is ready for the
+city. Oh, no! I forgot--and he probably came near doing so--his strip of
+'Mericani.[9] This was originally white, but constant wear over castor
+oil has turned it a uniform and beautiful brown.
+
+The purpose of this is ornament, and it is so worn. There has been an
+attempt, I understand, to force these innocent children to some sort of
+conventional decency while actually in the streets of Nairobi. It was
+too large an order. Some bring in clothes, to be sure, because the white
+man asks it; but why no sensible man could say. They are hung from one
+shoulder, flap merrily in the breeze, and are always quite frankly
+tucked up about the neck or under the arms when the wearer happens to be
+in haste. As a matter of fact these savages are so beautifully and
+smoothly formed; their red-brown or chocolate-brown skin is so fine in
+texture, and their complete unconsciousness so genuine that in an hour
+the newcomer is quite accustomed to their nakedness.
+
+These proud youths wander mincingly down the street with an expression
+of the most fatuous and good-natured satisfaction with themselves. To
+their minds they have evidently done every last thing that human
+ingenuity or convention could encompass.
+
+These young men are the dandies, the proud young aristocracy of wealth
+and importance; and of course they may differ individually or tribally
+from the sample I have offered. Also there are many other social grades.
+Those who care less for dress or have less to get it with can rub along
+very cheaply. The only real essentials are (_a_) something for the
+ear--a tomato can will do; (_b_) a trifle for clothing--and for that a
+scrap of gunny sacking will be quite enough.
+
+The women to be seen in the streets of Nairobi are mostly of the Kikuyu
+tribe. They are pretty much of a pattern. Their heads are shaven,
+either completely or to leave only ornamental tufts; and are generally
+bound with a fine wire fillet so tightly that the strands seem to sink
+into the flesh. A piece of cotton cloth, dyed dark umber red, is belted
+around the waist, and sometimes, but not always, another is thrown about
+the shoulder. They go in for more hardware than do the men. The entire
+arms and the calves of the legs are encased in a sort of armour made of
+quarter-inch wire wound closely, and a collar of the same material
+stands out like a ruff eight or ten inches around the neck. This is
+wound on for good; and must be worn day and night and all the time, a
+cumbersome and tremendously heavy burden. A dozen large loops of
+coloured beads strung through the ears, and various strings and
+necklaces of beads, cowrie shells, and the like finish them out in all
+their gorgeousness. They would sink like plummets. Their job in life,
+besides lugging all this stuff about, is to carry in firewood and
+forage. At any time of the day long files of them can be seen bending
+forward under their burdens. These they carry on their backs by means of
+a strap across the tops of their heads; after the fashion of the
+Canadian tump line.
+
+The next cut above the shenzi, or wild man, is the individual who has
+been on safari as carrier, or has otherwise been much employed around
+white men. From this experience he has acquired articles of apparel and
+points of view. He is given to ragged khaki, or cast-off garments of all
+sorts, but never to shoes. This hint of the conventional only serves to
+accent the little self-satisfied excursions he makes into barbarism. The
+shirt is always worn outside, the ear ornaments are as varied as ever,
+the head is shaved in strange patterns, a tiny tight tuft on the crown
+is useful as fastening for feathers or little streamers or anything else
+that will wave or glitter. One of these individuals wore a red label he
+had, with patience and difficulty, removed from one of our trunks. He
+had pasted it on his forehead; and it read "Baggage Room. Not Wanted."
+These people are, after all, but modified shenzis. The modification is
+nearly always in the direction of the comic.
+
+Now we step up to a class that would resent being called shenzis as it
+would resent an insult. This is the personal servant class. The members
+are of all tribes, with possibly a slight preponderance of Swahilis and
+Somalis. They are a very clean, well-groomed, self-respecting class,
+with a great deal of dignity, and a great deal of pride in their
+bwanas. Also they are exceedingly likely to degenerate unless ruled with
+a firm hand and a wise head. Very rarely are they dishonest as respects
+the possessions of their own masters. They understand their work
+perfectly, and the best of them get the equivalent of from eight to ten
+dollars a month. Every white individual has one or more of them; even
+the tiny children with their ridiculous little sun helmets are followed
+everywhere by a tall, solemn, white-robed black. Their powers of
+divination approach the uncanny. About the time you begin to think of
+wanting something, and are making a first helpless survey of a boyless
+landscape, your own servant suddenly, mysteriously, and unobtrusively
+appears from nowhere. Where he keeps himself, where he feeds himself,
+where he sleeps you do not know. These beautifully clean, trim,
+dignified people are always a pleasant feature in the varied picture.
+
+The Somalis are a clan by themselves. A few of them condescend to
+domestic service, but the most prefer the free life of traders, horse
+dealers, gunbearers, camel drivers, labour go-betweens, and similar
+guerrilla occupations. They are handsome, dashing, proud, treacherous,
+courageous, likeable, untrustworthy. They career around on their high,
+short-stirruped saddles; they saunter indolently in small groups; they
+hang about the hotel hoping for a dicker of some kind. There is nothing
+of the savage about them, but much of the true barbarism, with the
+barbarian's pride, treachery, and love of colour.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[8] Native farmlets, generally temporary.
+
+[9] White cotton cloth.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+RECRUITING.
+
+
+To the traveller Nairobi is most interesting as the point from which
+expeditions start and to which they return. Doubtless an extended stay
+in the country would show him that problems of administration and
+possibilities of development could be even more absorbing; but such
+things are very sketchy to him at first.
+
+As a usual thing, when he wants porters he picks them out from the
+throng hanging around the big outfitters' establishments. Each man is
+then given a blanket--cotton, but of a most satisfying red--a tin water
+bottle, a short stout cord, and a navy blue jersey. After that ceremony
+he is yours.
+
+But on the occasion of one three months' journey into comparatively
+unknown country we ran up against difficulties. Some two weeks before
+our contemplated start two or three cases of bubonic plague had been
+discovered in the bazaar, and as a consequence Nairobi was quarantined.
+This meant that a rope had been stretched around the infected area, that
+the shops had been closed, and that no native could--officially--leave
+Nairobi. The latter provision affected us; for under it we should be
+unable to get our bearers out.
+
+As a matter of fact, the whole performance--unofficially--was a farce.
+Natives conversed affably at arm's length across the ropes; hundreds
+sneaked in and out of town at will; and from the rear of the infected
+area I personally saw beds, chests, household goods, blankets, and
+clothes passed to friends outside the ropes. When this latter condition
+was reported, in my presence, to the medical officers, they replied that
+this was a matter for police cognizance! But the brave outward show of
+ropes, disinfectants, gorgeous sentries--in front--and official
+inspection went solemnly on. Great, even in Africa, is the god of red
+tape.
+
+Our only possible plan, in the circumstances, was to recruit the men
+outside the town, to camp them somewhere, march them across country to a
+way station, and there embark them. Our goods and safari stores we
+could then ship out to them by train.
+
+Accordingly we rode on bicycles out to the Swahili village.
+
+This is, as I have said, composed of large "beehive" houses thatched
+conically with straw. The roofs extend to form verandas beneath which
+sit indolent damsels, their hair divided in innumerable tiny parts
+running fore and aft like the stripes on a water melon; their figured
+'Mericani garments draped gracefully. As befitted the women of
+plutocrats, they wore much jewellery, some of it set in their noses.
+Most of them did all of nothing, but some sat half buried in narrow
+strips of bright-coloured tissue paper. These they were pasting together
+like rolls of tape, the coloured edges of the paper forming concentric
+patterns on the resultant discs--an infinite labour. The discs, when
+completed, were for insertion in the lobes of the ears.
+
+When we arrived the irregular "streets" of the village were nearly
+empty, save for a few elegant youths, in long kanzuas, or robes of
+cinnamon colour and spotless white, on their heads fezzes or turbans, in
+their hands slender rattan canes. They were very busy talking to each
+other, and of course did not notice the idle beauties beneath the
+verandas.
+
+Hardly had we appeared, however, when mysteriously came forth the
+headman--a bearded, solemn, Arab-like person with a phenomenally ugly
+face but a most pleasing smile. We told him we wanted porters. He
+clapped his hands. To the four young men who answered this summons he
+gave a command. From sleepy indolence they sprang into life. To the four
+cardinal points of the compass they darted away, running up and down the
+side streets, beating on the doors, screaming at the tops of their lungs
+the word "Cazi"[10] over and over again.
+
+The village hummed like a wasps' nest. Men poured from the huts in
+swarms. The streets were filled; the idle sauntering youths were
+swamped, and sunk from view. Clamour and shouting arose where before had
+been a droning silence. The mob beat up to where we stood, surrounding
+us, shouting at us. From somewhere some one brought an old table and two
+decrepit chairs, battered and rickety in themselves, but symbols of
+great authority in a community where nobody habitually used either. Two
+naked boys proudly took charge of our bicycles.
+
+We seated ourselves.
+
+"Fall in!" we yelled.
+
+About half the crowd fell into rough lines. The rest drew slightly to
+one side. Nobody stopped talking for a single instant.
+
+We arose and tackled our job. The first part of it was to segregate the
+applicants into their different tribes.
+
+"Monumwezi hapa!" we yelled; and the command was repeated and repeated
+again by the headman, by his four personal assistants, by a half-dozen
+lesser headmen. Slowly the Monumwezi drew aside. We impressed on them
+emphatically they must stay thus, and went after, in turn, the Baganda,
+the Wakamba, the Swahilis, the Kavirondo, the Kikuyu. When we had them
+grouped, we went over them individually. We punched their chests, we ran
+over all their joints, we examined their feet, we felt their muscles.
+Our victims stood rigidly at inspection, but their numerous friends
+surrounded us closely, urging the claims of the man to our notice. It
+was rather confusing, but we tried to go at it as though we were alone
+in a wilderness. If the man passed muster we motioned him to a rapidly
+growing group.
+
+When we had finished we had about sixty men segregated. Then we went
+over this picked lot again. This time we tried not only to get good
+specimens, but to mix our tribes. At last our count of twenty-nine was
+made up, and we took a deep breath. But to us came one of them
+complaining that he was a Monumwezi, and that we had picked only three
+Monumwezi, and--We cut him short. His contention was quite correct. A
+porter tent holds five, and it does not do to mix tribes.
+Reorganization! Cut out two extra Kavirondos, and include two more
+Monumwezi. "Bass! finished! Now go get your effects. We start
+immediately."
+
+As quickly as it had filled, the street cleared. The rejected dived back
+into their huts, the newly enlisted carriers went to collect their
+baggage. Only remained the headman and his fierce-faced assistants, and
+the splendid youths idling up and down--none of them had volunteered,
+you may be sure--and the damsels of leisure beneath the porticos. Also
+one engaging and peculiar figure hovering near.
+
+This individual had been particularly busy during our recruiting. He had
+hustled the men into line, he had advised us for or against different
+candidates, he had loudly sung my praises as a man to work for,
+although, of course, he knew nothing about me. Now he approached,
+saluted, smiled. He was a tall, slenderly-built person, with
+phenomenally long, thin legs, slightly rounded shoulders, a forward
+thrust, keen face, and remarkably long, slim hands. With these he
+gesticulated much, in a right-angled fashion, after the manner of
+Egyptian hieroglyphical figures. He was in no manner shenzi. He wore a
+fez, a neat khaki coat and shorts, blue puttees and boots. Also a belt
+with leather pockets, a bunch of keys, a wrist watch, and a seal ring.
+His air was of great elegance and social ease. We took him with us as
+C.'s gunbearer. He proved staunch, a good tracker, an excellent hunter,
+and a most engaging individual. His name was Kongoni, and he was a
+Wakamba.
+
+But now we were confronted with a new problem: that of getting our
+twenty-nine chosen ones together again. They had totally disappeared. In
+all directions we had emissaries beating up the laggards. As each man
+reappeared carrying his little bundle, we lined him up with his
+companions. Then when we turned our backs we lost him again; he had
+thought of another friend with whom to exchange farewells. At the long
+last, however, we got them all collected. The procession started, the
+naked boys proudly wheeling our bikes alongside. We saw them fairly
+clear of everything, then turned them over to Kongoni, while we returned
+to Nairobi to see after our effects.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[10] Work.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV. A LION HUNT ON KAPITI.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+AN OSTRICH FARM AT MACHAKOS.
+
+
+This has to do with a lion hunt on the Kapiti Plains. On the veranda at
+Nairobi I had some time previous met Clifford Hill, who had invited me
+to visit him at the ostrich farm he and his cousin were running in the
+mountains near Machakos. Some time later, a visit to Juja Farm gave me
+the opportunity. Juja is only a day's ride from the Hills'. So an
+Africander, originally from the south, Captain D., and I sent across a
+few carriers with our personal effects, and ourselves rode over on
+horseback.
+
+Juja is on the Athi Plains. Between the Athi and Kapiti Plains runs a
+range of low mountains around the end of which one can make his way as
+around a promontory. The Hills' ostrich farm was on the highlands in the
+bay on the other side of the promontory.
+
+It was towards the close of the rainy season, and the rivers were up.
+We had to swim our horses within a half-mile of Juja, and got pretty
+wet. Shortly after crossing the Athi, however, five miles on, we emerged
+on the dry, drained slopes from the hills. Here the grass was long, and
+the ticks plentiful. Our horses' legs and chests were black with them;
+and when we dismounted for lunch we ourselves were almost immediately
+alive with the pests. In this very high grass the game was rather
+scarce, but after we had climbed by insensible grades to the shorter
+growth we began to see many hartebeeste, zebra, and gazelles, and a few
+of the wildebeeste, or brindled gnus. Travel over these great plains and
+through these leisurely low hills is a good deal like coastwise
+sailing--the same apparently unattainable landmarks which, nevertheless,
+are at last passed and left astern by the same sure but insensible
+progress. Thus we drew up on apparently continuous hills, found wide
+gaps between them, crossed them, and turned to the left along the other
+side of the promontory. About five o'clock we came to the Hills'.
+
+The ostrich farm is situated on the very top of a conical rise that
+sticks up like an island close inshore to the semicircle of mountains in
+which end the vast plains of Kapiti. Thus the Hills have at their backs
+and sides these solid ramparts and face westward the immensities of
+space. For Kapiti goes on over the edge of the world to unknown,
+unguessed regions, rolling and troubled like a sea. And from that
+unknown, on very still days, the snowy peak of Kilimanjaro peers out,
+sketched as faintly against the sky as a soap bubble wafted upward and
+about to disappear. Here and there on the plains kopjes stand like
+islands, their stone tops looking as though thrust through the smooth
+prairie surface from beneath. To them meandered long, narrow ravines
+full of low brush, like thin, wavering streaks of gray. On these
+kopjes--each of which had its name--and in these ravines we were to hunt
+lions.
+
+We began the ascent of the cone on which dwelt our hosts. It was one of
+those hills that seem in no part steep, and yet which finally succeed in
+raising one to a considerable height. We passed two ostrich herds in
+charge of savages, rode through a scattered native village, and so came
+to the farm itself, situated on the very summit.
+
+The house consisted of three large circular huts, thatched neatly with
+papyrus stalks, and with conical roofs. These were arranged as a
+triangle, just touching each other; and the space between had been
+roofed over to form a veranda. We were ushered into one of these
+circular rooms. It was spacious and contained two beds, two chairs, a
+dresser, and a table. Its earth floor was completely covered by the
+skins of animals. In the corresponding room, opposite, slept our hosts;
+while the third was the living and dining room. A long table, raw-hide
+bottomed chairs, a large sideboard, bookcases, a long easy settee with
+pillows, gun racks, photographs in and out of frames, a table with
+writing materials, and books and magazines everywhere--not to speak of
+again the skins of many animals completely covering the floor. Out
+behind, in small, separate buildings, laboured the cook, and dwelt the
+stores, the bath-tub, and other such necessary affairs.
+
+As soon as we had consumed the usual grateful lime juice and sparklets,
+we followed our hosts into the open air to look around.
+
+On this high, airy hill top the Hills some day are going to build them a
+real house. In anticipation they have laid out grounds and have planted
+many things. In examining these my California training stood by me. Out
+there, as here, one so often examines his own and his neighbours'
+gardens, not for what they are but for what they shall become. His
+imagination can exalt this tiny seedling to the impressiveness of
+spreading noontime shade; can magnify yonder apparent duplicate to the
+full symmetry of a shrub; can ruthlessly diminish the present importance
+of certain grand and lofty growths to its true status of flower or
+animal. So from a dead uniformity of size he casts forward in the years
+to a pleasing variation of shade, of jungle, of open glade, of flowered
+vista; and he goes away full of expert admiration for "X.'s bully
+garden." With this solid training beneath me I was able on this occasion
+to please immensely.
+
+From the house site we descended the slope to where the ostriches and
+the cattle and the people were in the late sunlight swarming upward from
+the plains pastures below. These people were, to the chief extent,
+Wakamba, quite savage, but attracted here by the justness and fair
+dealing of the Hills. Some of them farmed on shares with the Hills, the
+white men furnishing the land and seed, and the black men the labour;
+some of them laboured on wage; some few herded cattle or ostriches; some
+were hunters and took the field only when, as now, serious business was
+afoot. They had their complete villages, with priests, witch doctors,
+and all; and they seemed both contented and fond of the two white men.
+
+As we walked about we learned much of the ostrich business; and in the
+course of our ten days' visit we came to a better realization of how
+much there is to think of in what appears basically so simple a
+proposition.
+
+In the nesting time, then, the Hills went out over the open country,
+sometimes for days at a time, armed with long high-power telescopes.
+With these fearsome and unwieldy instruments they surveyed the country
+inch by inch from the advantage of a kopje. When thus they discovered a
+nest, they descended and appropriated the eggs. The latter, hatched at
+home in an incubator, formed the nucleus of a flock.
+
+Pass the raising of ostrich chicks to full size through the difficulties
+of disease, wild beasts, and sheer cussedness. Of the resultant thirty
+birds or so of the season's catch, but two or three will even promise
+good production. These must be bred in captivity with other likely
+specimens. Thus after several years the industrious ostrich farmer may
+become possessed of a few really prime birds. To accumulate a proper
+flock of such in a new country is a matter of a decade or so. Extra
+prime birds are as well known and as much in demand for breeding as any
+blood horse in a racing country. Your true ostrich enthusiast, like the
+Hills, possesses trunks full of feathers not good commercially, but
+intensely interesting for comparison and for the purposes of prophecy.
+While I stayed with them came a rumour of a very fine plucking a distant
+neighbour had just finished from a likely two-year-old. The Hills were
+manifestly uneasy until one of them had ridden the long distance to
+compare this newcomer's product with that of their own two-year-olds.
+And I shall never forget the reluctantly admiring shake of the head with
+which he acknowledged that it was indeed a "very fine feather!"
+
+But getting the birds is by no means all of ostrich farming, as many
+eager experimenters have discovered to their cost. The birds must have a
+certain sort of pasture land; and their paddocks must be built on an
+earth that will not soil or break the edges of the new plumes.
+
+And then there is the constant danger of wild beasts. When a man has
+spent years in gathering suitable flocks, he cannot be blamed for wild
+anger when, as happened while I was in the country, lions kill sixty or
+seventy birds in a night. The ostrich seems to tempt lions greatly. The
+beasts will make their way through and over the most complicated
+defences. Any ostrich farmer's life is a constant warfare against them.
+Thus the Hills had slain sixty-eight lions in and near their farm--a
+tremendous record. Still the beasts continued to come in. My hosts
+showed me, with considerable pride, their arrangements finally evolved
+for night protection.
+
+The ostriches were confined in a series of heavy corrals, segregating
+the birds of different ages. Around the outside of this group of
+enclosures ran a wide ring corral in which were confined the numerous
+cattle; and as an outer wall to this were built the huts of the Wakamba
+village. Thus to penetrate to the ostriches the enterprising lion would
+have to pass both the people, the cattle, and the strong thorn and log
+structures that contained them.
+
+This subject brings me to another set of acquaintances we had already
+made--the dogs.
+
+These consisted of an Airedale named Ruby; two setters called Wayward
+and Girlie; a heavy black mongrel, Nero; ditto brindle, Ben; and a
+smaller black and white ditto, Ranger. They were very nice friendly
+doggy dogs, but they did not look like lion hunters. Nevertheless, Hill
+assured us that they were of great use in the sport, and promised us
+that on the following day we should see just how.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+THE FIRST LIONESS.
+
+
+At an early hour we loaded our bedding, food, tents, and camp outfit on
+a two-wheeled wagon drawn by four of the humpbacked native oxen, and
+sent it away across the plains, with instructions to make camp on a
+certain kopje. Clifford Hill and myself, accompanied by our gunbearers
+and syces, then rode leisurely down the length of a shallow brushy canon
+for a mile or so. There we dismounted and sat down to await the arrival
+of the others. These--including Harold Hill, Captain D., five or six
+Wakamba spearmen, our own carriers, and the dogs--came along more
+slowly, beating the bottoms on the off chance of game.
+
+The sun was just warming, and the bees and insects were filling the air
+with their sleepy droning sounds. The hillside opposite showed many
+little outcrops of rocks so like the hills of our own Western States
+that it was somewhat difficult to realize that we were in Africa. For
+some reason the delay was long. Then suddenly all four of us
+simultaneously saw the same thing. A quarter-mile away and on the
+hillside opposite a magnificent lioness came loping easily along through
+the grass. She looked very small at that distance, like a toy, and quite
+unhurried. Indeed, every few moments she paused to look back in an
+annoyed fashion over her shoulder in the direction of the row behind
+her.
+
+There was nothing to do but sit tight and wait. The lioness was headed
+exactly to cross our front; nor, except at one point, was she at all
+likely to deviate. A shallow tributary ravine ran into our own about two
+hundred yards away. She might possibly sneak down the bed of this. It
+seemed unlikely. The going was bad, and in addition she had no idea as
+yet that she had been sighted. Indeed, the chances were that she would
+come to a definite stop before making the crossing, in which case we
+would get a shot.
+
+"And if she does go down the donga," whispered Hill, "the dogs will
+locate her."
+
+Sitting still while things approach is always exciting. This is true of
+ducks; but when you multiply ducks by lions it is still more true. We
+all crouched very low in the grass. She leapt without hesitation into
+the ravine--and did not emerge.
+
+This was a disappointment. We concluded she must have entered the stream
+bottom, and were just about to move when Memba Sasa snapped his fingers.
+His sharp eyes had discovered her sneaking along, belly to the ground,
+like the cat she was. The explanation of this change in her gait was
+simple. Our companions had rounded the corner of the hill and were
+galloping in plain view a half-mile away. The lioness had caught sight
+of them.
+
+She was gliding by, dimly visible, through thick brush seventy yards
+distant. Now I could make out a tawny patch that faded while I looked;
+now I could merely guess at a melting shadow.
+
+"Stir her up," whispered Hill. "Never mind whether you hit. She'll sneak
+away."
+
+At the shot she leaped fully out into the open with a snarl. Promptly I
+planted a Springfield bullet in her ribs. She answered slightly to the
+hit, but did not shift position. Her head up, her tail thrashing from
+side to side, her ears laid back, she stood there looking the landscape
+over carefully point by point. She was searching for us, but as yet
+could not locate us. It was really magnificent.
+
+I attempted to throw in another cartridge, but because of my desire to
+work the bolt quietly, in order not to attract the lioness's attention,
+I did not pull it back far enough, and the cartridge jammed in the
+magazine. As evidence of Memba Sasa's coolness and efficiency, it is to
+be written that he became aware of this as soon as I did. He thrust
+the.405 across my right side, at the same time withdrawing the
+Springfield on the left. The motion was slight, but the lioness caught
+it. Immediately she dropped her head and charged.
+
+For the next few moments, naturally, I was pretty intent on lions.
+Nevertheless a corner of my mind was aware of Memba Sasa methodically
+picking away at the jammed rifle, and paying no attention whatever to
+the beast. Also I heard Hill making picturesque remarks about his
+gunbearer, who had bolted with his second gun.
+
+The lioness charged very fast, but very straight, about in the tearing,
+scrambling manner of a terrier after a thrown ball. I got in the first
+shot as she came, the bullet ranging back from the shoulder, and Hill
+followed it immediately with another from his.404 Jeffrey. She growled
+at the bullets, and checked very slightly as they hit, but gave no other
+sign. Then our second shots hit her both together. The mere shock
+stopped her short, but recovering instantly, she sprang forward again.
+Hill's third shot came next, and perceptibly slowed and staggered, but
+did not stop her. By this time she was quite close, and my own third
+shot reached her brain. She rolled over dead.
+
+Decidedly she was a game beast, and stood more hammering than any other
+lion I killed or saw killed. Before the final shot in the brain she had
+taken one light bullet and five heavy ones with hardly a wince. Memba
+Sasa uttered a loud grunt of satisfaction when she went down for good.
+He had the Springfield reloaded and cocked, right at my elbow.
+
+Hill's gunboy hovered uncertainly some distance in the rear. The sight
+of the charging lioness had been too much for him and he had bolted. He
+was not actually up a tree; but he stood very near one. He lost the gun
+and acquired a swift kick.
+
+Our friends and the men now came up. The dogs made a great row over the
+dead lioness. She was measured and skinned to accompaniment of the usual
+low-hummed chantings. We had with us a small boy of ten or twelve years
+whose job it was to take care of the dogs and to remove ticks. In fact
+he was known as the Tick Toto. As this was his first expedition afield,
+his father took especial pains to smear him with fat from the lioness.
+This was to make him brave. I am bound to confess the effect was not
+immediate.
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+THE DOGS.
+
+
+I soon discovered that we were hunting lions with the assistance of the
+dogs; not that the dogs were hunting lions. They had not lost any lions,
+not they! My mental pictures of the snarling, magnificent king of beasts
+surrounded by an equally snarling, magnificent pack vanished into thin
+air.
+
+Our system was to cover as much likely country as we could, and to let
+the dogs have a good time. As I have before indicated, they were
+thoroughly doggy dogs, and interested in everything--except able-bodied
+lions. None of the stick-at-your-heels in their composition. They ranged
+far and wide through all sorts of cover, seeking what they could find in
+the way of porcupines, mongoose, hares, birds, cats, and whatever else
+should interest any healthy-minded dog. If there happened to be any
+lions in the path of these rangings, the dogs retired rapidly,
+discreetly, and with every symptom of horrified disgust. If a dog came
+sailing out of a thicket, ki-yi-ing agitatedly, and took up his
+position, tail between his legs, behind his master, we knew there was
+probably a lion about. Thus we hunted lions with dogs.
+
+But in order to be fair to these most excellent canines, it should be
+recorded that they recovered a certain proportion of their nerve after a
+rifle had been fired. They then returned warily to the--not
+attack--reconnaissance. This trait showed touching faith, and was a real
+compliment to the marksmanship of their masters. Some day it will be
+misplaced. A little cautious scouting on their part located the wounded
+beast; whereupon, at a respectful distance, they lifted their voices. As
+a large element of danger in case of a wounded lion is the uncertainty
+as to his whereabouts, it will be seen that the dogs were very valuable
+indeed. They seemed to know exactly how badly hit any animal might
+happen to be, and to gauge their distance accordingly, until at last,
+when the quarry was hammered to harmlessness, they closed in and began
+to worry the nearly lifeless carcass. By this policy the dogs had a lot
+of fun hunting on their own hook, preserved their lives from otherwise
+inevitable extinction, and were of great assistance in saving their
+masters' skins.
+
+One member of the pack, perhaps two, were, however, rather pathetic
+figures. I refer to the setters, Wayward and Girlie. Ranger, Ruby, Ben,
+and Nero scampered merrily over the landscape after anything that
+stirred, from field mice to serval cats. All was game to their catholic
+tastes; and you may be sure, in a country like Africa, they had few dull
+moments. But Wayward and Girlie had been brought up in a more exclusive
+manner. Their early instincts had been supplemented by a rigorous early
+training. Game to them meant birds, and birds only. Furthermore, they
+had been solemnly assured by human persons in whom they had the utmost
+confidence, that but one sequence of events was permissible or even
+thinkable in the presence of game. The Dog at first intimation by scent
+must convey the fact to the Man, must proceed cautiously to locate
+exactly, must then stiffen to a point which he must hold staunchly, no
+matter how distracting events might turn out, or how long an interval
+might elapse. The Man must next walk up the birds; shoot at them,
+perhaps kill one, then command the Dog to retrieve. The Dog must on no
+account move from his tracks until such command is given. All the affair
+is perfectly simple; but quite inflexible. Any variation in this
+procedure fills the honest bird dog's mind with the same horror and
+dismay experienced by a well-brought-up young man who discovers that he
+has on shoes of the wrong colour. It isn't done, you know.
+
+Consider, then, Wayward and Girlie in a country full of game birds. They
+quarter wide to right, then cross to left, their heads high, their
+feather tails waving in the most approved good form. When they find
+birds they draw to their points in the best possible style; stiffen
+out--and wait. It is now, according to all good ethics, up to the Man.
+And the Man and his companions go right on by, paying absolutely no
+attention either to the situation or one's own magnificent piece of
+work! What is one to conclude? That our early training is all wrong?
+that we are at one experience to turn apostate to the settled and only
+correct order of things? Or that our masters are no gentlemen? That is a
+pretty difficult thing, an impossible thing, to conclude of one's own
+master. But it leaves one in a fearful state mentally; and one has no
+idea of what to do!
+
+Wayward was a perfect gentleman, and he played the game according to
+the very best traditions. He conscientiously pointed every bird he could
+get his nose on. Furthermore he was absolutely staunch, and held his
+point even when the four non-bird dogs rushed in ahead of him. The
+expression of puzzlement, grief, shock, and sadness in his eyes deepened
+as bird after bird soared away without a shot. Girlie was more
+liberal-minded. She pointed her birds, and backed Wayward at need, but
+when the other dogs rushed her point, she rushed too. And when we swept
+on by her, leaving her on point, instead of holding it quixotically, as
+did Wayward, until the bird sneaked away, she merely waited until we
+were out of sight, and then tried to catch it. Finally Captain D.
+remarked that, lions or no lions, he was not going to stand it any
+longer. He got out a shotgun, and all one afternoon killed grouse over
+Wayward, to the latter's intense relief. His ideals had been
+rehabilitated.
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+BONDONI.
+
+
+We followed many depressions, in which might be lions, until about three
+o'clock in the afternoon. Then we climbed the gently-rising long slope
+that culminated, far above the plains, in the peak of a hill called
+Bondoni. From a distance it was steep and well defined; but, like most
+of these larger kopjes, its actual ascent, up to the last few hundred
+feet, was so gradual that we hardly knew we were climbing. At the summit
+we found our men and the bullock cart. There also stood an oblong
+blockhouse of stone, the walls two feet thick and ten feet high. It was
+entered only by a blind angle passage, and was strong enough,
+apparently, to resist small artillery. This structure was simply an
+ostrich corral, and bitter experience had shown the massive construction
+absolutely necessary as adequate protection, in this exposed and
+solitary spot, against the lions.
+
+We had some tea and bread and butter, and then Clifford Hill and I set
+out afoot after meat. Only occasionally do these hard-working settlers
+get a chance for hunting on the plains so near them; and now they had
+promised their native retainers that they would send back a treat of
+game. To carry this promised luxury, a number of the villagers had
+accompanied the bullock wagon. As we were to move on next day, it became
+very desirable to get the meat promptly while still near home.
+
+We slipped over to the other side, and by good fortune caught sight of a
+dozen zebras feeding in scrub half-way down the hill. They were out of
+their proper environment up there, but we were glad of it. Down on our
+tummies, then, we dropped, and crawled slowly forward through the high,
+sweet grasses. We were in the late afternoon shadow of the hill, and we
+enjoyed the mild skill of the stalk. Taking advantage of every cover,
+slipping over into little ravines, lying very flat when one of the
+beasts raised his head, we edged nearer and nearer. We were already well
+within range, but it amused us to play the game. Finally, at one hundred
+yards, we came to a halt. The zebra showed very handsome at that range,
+for even their smaller leg stripes were all plainly visible. Of course
+at that distance there could be small chance of missing, and we owned
+one each. The Wakamba, who had been watching eagerly, swarmed down,
+shouting.
+
+We dined just at sunset under a small tree at the very top of the peak.
+Long bars of light shot through the western clouds; the plain turned
+from solid earth to a mysterious sea of shifting twilights; the buttes
+stood up, wrapped in veils of soft desert colours; Kilimanjaro hung
+suspended like a rose-coloured bubble above the abyss beyond the world.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+RIDING THE PLAINS.
+
+
+From the mere point of view of lions, lion A hunting was very slow work
+indeed. It meant riding the whole of long days, from dawn until dark,
+investigating miles of country that looked all alike and in which we
+seemed to get nowhere. One by one the long billows of plain fell behind,
+until our camp hill had turned blue behind us, and we seemed to be out
+in illimitable space, with no possibility, in an ordinary lifetime, of
+ever getting in touch with anything again. What from above had looked as
+level as a floor now turned into a tremendously wide and placid ground
+swell. As a consequence we were always going imperceptibly up and up and
+up to a long-delayed sky-line, or tipping as gently down the other side
+of the wave. From crest to crest of these long billows measured two or
+three miles. The vertical distance in elevation from trough to top was
+perhaps not over fifty to one hundred feet.
+
+Slowly we rode along the shallow grass and brush ravines in the troughs
+of the low billows, while the dogs worked eagerly in and out of cover,
+and our handful of savages cast stones and shouted. Occasionally we
+divided forces, and beat the length of a hill, two of us lying in wait
+at one end for the possible lion, the rest sweeping the sides and
+summits. Many animals came bounding along, but no lions. Then Harold
+Hill, unlimbering a huge, many-jointed telescope, would lie flat on his
+back, and sight the fearsome instrument over his crossed feet, in a
+general bird's-eye view of the plains for miles around. While he was at
+it we were privileged to look about us, less under the burden of
+responsibility. We could make out the game as little, light-coloured
+dots and speckles, thousands upon thousands of them, thicker than cattle
+ever grazed on the open range, and as far as the eye could make them
+out, and then a glance through our glasses picked them up again for mile
+after mile. Even the six-power could go no farther. The imagination was
+left the vision of more leagues of wild animals even to the half-guessed
+azure mountains--and beyond. I had seen abundant game elsewhere in
+Africa, but nothing like the multitudes inhabiting the Kapiti Plains at
+that time of year. In other seasons this locality is comparatively
+deserted.
+
+The glass revealing nothing in our line, we rode again to the lower
+levels, and again took up our slow, painstaking search.
+
+But although three days went by in this manner without our getting a
+glimpse of lions, they were far from being days lost. Minor adventure
+filled our hours. What elsewhere would be of major interest and strange
+and interesting experience met us at every turn. The game, while
+abundant, was very shy. This had nothing to do with distrust of hunters,
+but merely with the fact that it was the season of green grass. We liked
+to come upon animals unexpectedly, to see them buck-jump and cavort.
+
+Otherwise we rode in a moving space cleared of animals, the beasts
+unobtrusively giving way before us, and as unobtrusively closing in
+behind. The sun flashed on the spears of savages travelling single file
+across the distance. Often we stopped short to gaze upon a wild and
+tumbled horizon of storm that Gustave Dore might have drawn.
+
+The dogs were always joyously routing out some beast, desirable from
+their point of view, and chasing it hopelessly about, to our great
+amusement. Once they ran into a giant porcupine-about the size a setter
+would be, with shorter legs-which did not understand running away. They
+came upon it in a dense thicket, and the ensuing row was unholy. They
+managed to kill the porcupine among them, after which we plucked barbed
+quills from some very grieved dogs. The quills were large enough to make
+excellent penholders. The dogs also swore by all canine gods that they
+wouldn't do a thing to a hyena, if only they could get hold of one. They
+never got hold of one, for the hyena is a coward. His skull and teeth,
+however, are as big and powerful as those of a lioness; so I do not know
+which was luckier in his avoidance of trouble--he or the dogs.
+
+Nor from the shooting standpoint did we lack for sport. We had to shoot
+for our men, and we occasionally needed meat ourselves. It was always
+interesting, when such necessities arose, to stalk the shy buck and do
+long-range rifle practice. This shooting, however, was done only after
+the day's hunt was over. We had no desire to spoil our lion chances.
+
+The long circle towards our evening camp always proved very long indeed.
+We arrived at dusk to find supper ready for us. As we were old
+campaigners we ate this off chop boxes as tables, and sat on the ground.
+It was served by a Wakamba youth we had nicknamed Herbert Spencer, on
+account of his gigantic intellect. Herbert meant well, but about all he
+succeeded in accomplishing was a pathetically wrinkled brow of care and
+scared eyes. He had never been harshly treated by any of us, but he
+acted as though always ready to bolt. If there were twenty easy right
+methods of doing a thing and one difficult wrong method, Herbert would
+get the latter every time. No amount of experience could teach him the
+logic of our simplest ways. One evening he brought a tumbler of mixed
+water and condensed milk. Harold Hill glanced into the receptacle.
+
+"Stir it," he commanded briefly.
+
+Herbert Spencer obeyed. We talked about something else. Some five or ten
+minutes later one of us noticed that Herbert was still stirring, and
+called attention to the fact. When the latter saw our eyes were on him
+he speeded up until the spoon fairly rattled in the tumbler. Then, when
+he thought our attention had relaxed again, he relaxed also his
+efforts--the spoon travelled slower and slower in its dreamy circle. We
+amused ourselves for some time thus. Then we became so weak from
+laughter that we fell backward off our seats, and some one gasped a
+command that Herbert cease.
+
+I am afraid, after a little, that we rather enjoyed mildly tormenting
+poor Herbert Spencer. He tried so hard, and looked so scared, and was so
+unbelievably stupid! Almost always he had to pick his orders word by
+word from a vast amount of high-flown, unnecessary English.
+
+"O Herbert Spencer," the command would run, "if you would condescend to
+bend your mighty intellect to the lowly subject of maji, and will snatch
+time from your profound cerebrations to assure its being moto sans, I
+would esteem it infinite condescension on your part to let pesi pesi."
+
+And Herbert, listening to all this with a painful, strained intensity,
+would catch the six-key words, and would falter forth a trembling "N'dio
+bwana."
+
+Somewhere down deep within Herbert Spencer's make up, however, was a
+sense of moral duty. When we finally broke camp for good, on the great
+hill of Lucania, Herbert Spencer, relieved from his job, bolted like a
+shot. As far as we could see him he was running at top speed. If he had
+not possessed a sense of duty, he would have done this long ago.
+
+We camped always well up on some of the numerous hills; for, although
+anxious enough to find lions in the daytime, we had no use for them at
+all by night. This usually meant that the boys had to carry water some
+distance. We kept a canvas bath-tub full for the benefit of the dogs,
+from which they could drink at any time. This necessary privilege after
+a hard day nearly drove Captain D. crazy. It happened like this:
+
+We were riding along the slope of a hillside, when in the ravine, a half
+mile away and below us, we saw something dark pop up in sight and then
+down again. We shouted to some of the savage Wakamba to go and
+investigate. They closed in from all sides, their long spears poised to
+strike. At the last moment out darted, not an animal, but a badly
+frightened old man armed with bow and arrow. He dashed out under the
+upraised spears, clasped one of the men around the knees, and implored
+protection. Our savages, their spears ready, glanced over their
+shoulders for instruction. They would have liked nothing better than to
+have spitted the poor old fellow.
+
+We galloped down as fast as possible to the rescue. With reluctance our
+spearmen drew back, releasing their prize. We picked up his scattered
+bows and arrows, restored them to him, and uttered many reassurances. He
+was so badly frightened that he could not stand for the trembling of his
+knees. Undoubtedly he thought that war had broken out, and that he was
+the first of its unconscious victims. After calming him down, we told
+him what we were doing, and offered to shoot him meat if he cared to
+accompany us. He accepted the offer with joy. So pleased and relieved
+was he, that he skipped about like a young and nimble goat. His hunting
+companion, who all this time had stood atop of a hill at a safe
+distance, viewed these performances with concern. Our captive shouted
+loudly for him to come join us and share in the good fortune. Not he! He
+knew a trap when he saw one! Not a bit disturbed by the tales this man
+would probably carry back home, our old fellow attached himself to us
+for three days!
+
+Near sundown, to make our promise good, and also to give our own men a
+feast, I shot two hartebeeste near camp.
+
+The evening was beautiful. The Machakos Range, miles distant across the
+valley, was mantled with thick, soft clouds. From our elevation we could
+see over them, and catch the glow of moonlight on their upper surfaces.
+We were very tired, so we turned in early and settled ourselves for a
+good rest.
+
+Outside our tent the little "Injun fire" we had built for our own
+comfort died down to coals. A short distance away, however, was a huge
+bonfire around which all the savages were gathered. They squatted
+comfortably on their heels, roasting meat. Behind each man was planted
+his glittering long-bladed spear. The old man held the place of honour,
+as befitted his flirtation with death that morning. Everybody was
+absolutely happy--a good fire, plenty of meat, and strangers with whom
+to have a grand "shauri." The clatter of tongues was a babel, for almost
+every one talked at once and excitedly. Those who did not talk crooned
+weird, improvised chants, in which they detailed the doings of the camp.
+
+We fell very quickly into the half doze of too great exhaustion. It
+never became more than a half doze. I suppose every one who reads this
+has had at some time the experience of dropping asleep to the
+accompaniment of some noise that ought soon to cease--a conversation in
+the next room, singing, the barking of a dog, the playing of music, or
+the like. The fact that it ought soon to cease, permits the falling
+asleep. When, after an interval, the subconsciousness finds the row
+still going on, inexcusable and unabated, it arouses the victim to
+staring exasperation. That was our case here. Those natives should have
+turned in for sleep after a reasonable amount of pow-wow. They did
+nothing of the kind. On the contrary, I dragged reluctantly back to
+consciousness and the realization that they had quite happily settled
+down to make a night of it. I glanced across the little tent to where
+Captain D. lay on his cot. He was staring straight upward, his eyes wide
+open.
+
+After a few seconds he slipped out softly and silently. Our little fire
+had sunk to embers. A dozen sticks radiated from the centre of coals.
+Each made a firebrand with one end cool to the grasp. Captain D. hurled
+one of these at the devoted and unconscious group.
+
+It whirled through the air and fell plunk in the other fire, scattering
+sparks and coals in all directions. The second was under way before the
+first had landed. It hit a native with similar results, plus astonished
+and grieved language. The rest followed in rapid-magazine-fire. Every
+one hit its mark fair and square. The air was full of sparks exploding
+in all directions. The brush was full of Wakamba, their blankets
+flapping in the breeze of their going. The convention was adjourned.
+There fell the sucking vacuum of a great silence. Captain D., breathing
+righteous wrath, flopped heavily and determinedly down on his cot. I
+caught a faint snicker from the tent next door.
+
+Captain D. sighed deeply, turned over, and prepared to sleep. Then one
+of the dogs uprose--I think it was Ben--stretched himself, yawned,
+approached deliberately, and began to drink from the canvas bath-tub
+just outside. He drank--lap, lap, lap, lap--for a very long time. It
+seemed incredible that any mere dog--or canvas bath-tub--could hold so
+much water. The steady repetition of this sound long after it should
+logically have ceased was worse than the shenzi gathering around the
+fire. Each lap should have been the last, but it was not. The shenzi
+convention had been abated with firebrands, but the dog was strictly
+within his rights. The poor pups had had a long day with little water,
+and they could hardly be blamed for feeling a bit feverish now. At last
+Ben ceased. Next morning Captain D. claimed vehemently that he had drunk
+two hours forty-nine minutes and ten seconds. With a contented sigh Ben
+lay down. Then Ruby got up, shook herself, and yawned. A bright idea
+struck her. She too went over and had a drink. After that I, personally,
+went to sleep. But in the morning I found Captain D. staring-eyed and
+strung nearly to madness, trying feverishly to calculate how seven dogs
+drinking on an average of three hours apiece could have finished by
+morning. When Harold Hill innocently asked if he had slept well, the
+captain threw the remaining but now extinct firebrand at him.
+
+One of the safari boys, a big Baganda, had twisted his foot a little,
+and it had swelled up considerably. In the morning he came to have it
+attended to. The obvious treatment was very hot water and rest; but it
+would never do to tell him so. The recommendation of so simple a remedy
+would lose me his faith. So I gave him a little dab of tick ointment
+wrapped in a leaf.
+
+"This," said I, "is most wonderful medicine; but it is also most
+dangerous. If you were to rub it on your foot or your hand or any part
+of you, that part would drop off. But if you wash the part in very hot
+water continuously for a half hour, and then put on the medicine, it is
+good, and will cure you very soon." I am sure I do not know what they
+put in tick ointment; nor, for the purpose, did it greatly matter. That
+night, also, Herbert Spencer reached the climax of his absurdities. The
+chops he had cooked did not quite suffice for our hunger, so we
+instructed him to give us some of the leg. By this we meant steak, of
+course. Herbert Spencer was gone so long a time that finally we went to
+see what possibly could be the matter. We found him trying desperately
+to cook the whole leg in a frying-pan!
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+THE SECOND LIONESS.
+
+
+Now our luck changed most abruptly. We had been riding since early
+morning over the wide plains. By and by we came to a wide, shallow,
+flood-water course carpeted with lava boulders and scant, scattered
+brush. Two of us took one side of it, and two the other. At this we were
+just within hailing distance. The boys wandered down the middle.
+
+Game was here very abundant, and in this broken country proved quite
+approachable. I saw one Grant's gazelle head, in especial, that greatly
+tempted me; but we were hunting lions, and other shooting was out of
+place. Also the prospects for lions had brightened, for we were
+continually seeing hyenas in packs of from three to six. They lay among
+the stones, but galloped away at our approach. The game paid not the
+slightest attention to these huge, skulking brutes. One passed within
+twenty feet of a hartebeeste; the latter hardly glanced at him. As the
+hyena is lazy as well as cowardly, and almost never does his killing, we
+inferred a good meat supply to gather so many of them in one place. From
+a tributary ravine we flushed nineteen!
+
+Harold Hill was riding with me on the right bank. His quick eye caught a
+glimpse of something beyond our companions on the left side. A glance
+through the glasses showed me that it was a lion, just disappearing over
+the hill. At once we turned our horses to cross. It was a heavy job. We
+were naturally in a tremendous hurry; and the footing among those
+boulders and rounded rocks was so vile that a very slow trot was the
+best we could accomplish. And that was only by standing in our stirrups,
+and holding up our horses' heads by main strength. We reached the
+sky-line in time to see a herd of game stampeding away from a depression
+a half-mile away. We fixed our eyes on that point, and a moment later
+saw the lion or lioness, as it turned out, leap a gully and come out the
+other side.
+
+The footing down this slope, too, was appalling, consisting mainly of
+chunks of lava interspersed with smooth, rounded stones and sparse tufts
+of grass. In spite of the stones we managed a sort of stumbling gallop.
+Why we did not all go down in a heap I do not know. At any rate we had
+no chance to watch our quarry, for we were forced to keep our eyes
+strictly to our way. When finally we emerged from that tumble of rocks,
+she had disappeared.
+
+Either she had galloped out over the plains, or she had doubled back to
+take cover in the ravine. In the latter case she would stand. Our first
+job, therefore, was to determine whether she had escaped over the open
+country. To this end we galloped our horses madly in four different
+directions, pushing them to the utmost, swooping here and there in wide
+circles. That was an exhilarating ten minutes until we had surmounted
+every billow of the plain, spied in all directions, and assured
+ourselves beyond doubt that she had not run off. The horses fairly flew,
+spurning the hard sod, leaping the rock dikes, skipping nimbly around
+the pig holes, turning like cow-ponies under pressure of knee and rein.
+Finally we drew up, converged, and together jogged our sweating horses
+back to the ravine. There we learned from the boys that nothing more had
+been seen of our quarry.
+
+We dismounted, handed our mounts to their syces, and prepared to make
+afoot a clean sweep of the wide, shallow ravine. Here was where the dogs
+came in handy. We left a rearguard of two men, and slowly began our
+beat.
+
+The ravine could hardly be called a ravine; rather a shallow depression
+with banks not over a foot high, and with a varying width of from two to
+two hundred feet. The grass grew very patchy, and not very high; in
+fact, it seemed hardly tall enough to conceal anything as large as a
+lioness. We men walked along the edge of this depression, while the dogs
+ranged back and forth in its bottom.
+
+We had gone thus a quarter-mile when one of the rearguard came running
+up.
+
+"Bwana," said he, "we have seen the lioness. She is lying in a patch of
+grass. After you had passed, we saw her raise her head."
+
+It seemed impossible that she should have escaped both our eyes and the
+dogs' noses, but we returned. The man pointed out a thin growth of
+dried, yellow grass ten feet in diameter. Then it seemed even more
+incredible. Apparently we could look right through every foot of it. The
+man persisted, so we advanced in battle array. At thirty yards Captain
+D. saw the black tips of her ears. We all looked hard, and at last made
+her out, lying very flat, her head between her paws. Even then she was
+shadowy and unreal, and, as I have said, the cover did not look thick
+enough to conceal a good-sized dog.
+
+As though she realized she had been sighted, she at this moment leapt to
+her feet. Instantly I put a.405 bullet into her shoulder. Any other lion
+I ever saw or heard of would in such circumstances and at such a
+distance immediately have charged home. She turned tail and ran away. I
+missed her as she ran, then knocked her down with a third shot. She got
+up again, but was immediately hit by Captain D.'s.350 Magnum and brought
+to a halt. The dogs, seeing her turn tail and hearing our shots, had
+scrambled madly after her. We dared not shoot again for fear of hitting
+one of them, so we dashed rapidly into the grass and out the other side.
+Before we could get to her, she had sent Ruby flying through the air,
+and had then fallen over dead. Ruby got off lucky with only a deep gash
+the length of her leg.
+
+This was the only instance I experienced of a wounded lion showing the
+white feather. She was, however, only about three-quarters grown, and
+was suffering from diarrhoea.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+THE BIG LION.
+
+
+The boys skinned her while we ate lunch. Then we started several of them
+back towards camp with the trophy, and ourselves cut across country to a
+small river known as the Stony Athi. There we dismounted from our
+horses, and sent them and the boys atop the ridge above the stream,
+while we ourselves explored afoot the hillside along the river.
+
+This was a totally different sort of country from that to which we had
+been accustomed. Imagine a very bouldery hillside planted thickly with
+knee-high brambles and more sparsely with higher bushes. They were not
+really brambles, of course, but their tripping, tangling, spiky
+qualities were the same. We had to force our way through these, or step
+from boulder to boulder. Only very rarely did we get a little rubbly
+clear space to walk in, and then for only ten or twenty feet. We tried
+in spaced intervals to cover the whole hillside. It was very hard work.
+The boys, with the horses, kept pace with us on the sky-line atop, and
+two or three hundred yards away.
+
+We had proceeded in this fashion for about a mile, when suddenly, and
+most unexpectedly, the biggest lion I ever saw leapt straight up from a
+bush twenty-five yards in front of me, and with a tremendous roar
+vanished behind another bush. I had just time to throw up the.405
+shotgun-fashion and let drive a snapshot. Clifford Hill, who was ten
+yards to my right, saw the fur fly, and we all heard the snarl as the
+bullet hit. Naturally we expected an instant charge, but, as things
+turned out, it was evident the lion had not seen us at all. He had leapt
+at the sight of our men and horses on the sky-line, and when the bullet
+hit he must have ascribed it to them. At any rate, he began to circle
+through the tangled vines in their direction.
+
+From their elevation they could follow his movements. At once they set
+up howls of terror and appeals for help. Some began frantically to run
+back and forth. None of them tried to run away; there was nowhere to go!
+The only thing that saved them was the thick and spiky character of the
+cover. The lion, instead of charging straight and fast, was picking an
+easy way.
+
+We tore directly up hill as fast as we were able, leaping from rock to
+rock, and thrusting recklessly through the tangle. About half-way up I
+jumped to the top of a high, conical rock, and thence by good luck
+caught sight of the lion's great yellow head advancing steadily about
+eighty yards away. I took as good a sight as I could and pulled trigger.
+The recoil knocked me clear off the boulder, but as I fell I saw his
+tail go up and knew that I had hit. At once Clifford Hill and I jumped
+up on the rock again, but the lion had moved out of sight. By this time,
+however, the sound of the shots and the smell of blood had caused the
+dogs to close in. They did not, of course, attempt to attack the lion,
+nor even to get very near him, but their snarling and barking showed us
+the beast's whereabouts. Even this much is bad judgment on their part,
+as a number of them have been killed at it. The thicket burst into an
+unholy row.
+
+We all manoeuvred rapidly for position. Again luck was with me, for
+again I saw his great head, the mane standing out all around it; and
+for the second time I planted a heavy bullet square in his chest. This
+stopped his advance; he lay down. His head was up and his eyes glared,
+as he uttered the most reverberating and magnificent roars and growls.
+The dogs leapt and barked around him. We came quite close, and I planted
+my fourth bullet in his shoulder. Even this was not enough. It took a
+fifth in the same place to finish him, and he died at last biting great
+chunks of earth.
+
+The howls from the hill top ceased. All gathered to marvel at the lion's
+immense size. He measured three feet nine inches at the shoulder, and
+nine feet eleven inches between stakes, or ten feet eleven inches along
+contour. This is only five inches under record. We weighed him
+piecemeal, after a fashion, and put him between 550 and 600 pounds.
+
+But these are only statistics, and mean little unless a real attempt is
+made to visualize them. As a matter of fact, his mere height--that of a
+medium-size zebra-was little unless accented by the impression of his
+tremendous power and quickness.
+
+We skinned him, and then rode four long hours to camp. We arrived at
+dark, and at once set to work preparing the trophy. A dozen of us
+squatted around the skin, working by lantern light. Memba Sasa had had
+nothing to eat since before dawn, but in his pride and delight he
+refused to touch a mouthful until the job was finished. Several times we
+urged him to stop long enough for even a bite. He steadily declined, and
+whetted his knife, his eyes gleaming with delight, his lips crooning one
+of his weird Monumwezi songs. At eleven o'clock the task was done. Then
+I presented Memba Sasa with a tall mug of coffee and lots of sugar. He
+considered this a great honour.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV.
+
+THE FIFTEEN LIONS.
+
+
+Two days before Captain D. and I were to return to Juja we approached,
+about eleven o'clock in the morning, a long, low, rugged range of hills
+called Lucania. They were not very high, but bold with cliffs, buttes,
+and broken rocky stretches. Here we were to make our final hunt.
+
+We led our safari up to the level of a boulder flat between two deep
+canons that ran down from the hills. Here should be water, so we
+gathered under a lone little tree, and set about directing the simple
+disposition of our camp. Herbert Spencer brought us a cold lunch, and we
+sat down to rest and refreshment before tackling the range.
+
+Hardly had we taken the first mouthfuls, however, when Memba Sasa,
+gasping for breath, came tearing up the slope from the canon where he
+had descended for a drink. "Lions!" he cried, guardedly. "I went to
+drink, and I saw four lions. Two were lying under the shade, but two
+others were playing like puppies, one on its back."
+
+While he was speaking a lioness wandered out from the canon and up the
+opposite slope. She was somewhere between six and nine hundred yards
+away, and looked very tiny; but the binoculars brought us up to her with
+a jump. Through them she proved to be a good one. She was not at all
+hurried, but paused from time to time to yawn and look about her. After
+a short interval, another, also a lioness, followed in her footsteps.
+She too had climbed clear when a third, probably a full-grown but still
+immature lion, came out, and after him the fourth.
+
+"You were right," we told Memba Sasa, "there are your four."
+
+But while we watched, a fifth, again at the spaced interval, this time a
+maned lion, clambered leisurely up in the wake of his family; and after
+him another, and another, and yet another! We gasped, and sat down, the
+better to steady our glasses with our knees. There seemed no end to
+lions. They came out of that apparently inexhaustible canon bed one at a
+time and at the same regular intervals; perhaps twenty yards or so
+apart. It was almost as though they were being released singly. Finally
+we had _fifteen_ in sight.
+
+It was a most magnificent spectacle, and we could enjoy it unhurried by
+the feeling that we were losing opportunities. At that range it would be
+silly to open fire. If we had descended to the canon in order to follow
+them out the other side, they would merely have trotted away. Our only
+chance was to wait until they had disappeared from sight, and then to
+attempt a wide circle in order to catch them from the flank. In the
+meantime we had merely to sit still.
+
+Therefore we stared through our glasses, and enjoyed to the full this
+most unusual sight. There were four cubs about as big as setter dogs,
+four full-grown but immature youngsters, four lionesses, and three male
+lions. They kept their spaced, single file formation for two-thirds the
+ascent of the hill--probably the nature of the ground forced them to
+it--and then gradually drew together. Near the top, but still below the
+summit, they entered a jumble of boulders and stopped. We could make out
+several of them lying down. One fine old yellow fellow stretched himself
+comfortably atop a flat rock, in the position of a bronze lion on a
+pedestal. We waited twenty minutes to make sure they were not going to
+move. Then, leaving all our men except the gunbearers under the tree, we
+slipped back until out of sight, and began to execute our flank
+movement. The chances seemed good. The jumble of boulders was surrounded
+by open country, and it was improbable the lions could leave it without
+being seen. We had arranged with our men a system of signals.
+
+For two hours we walked very hard in order to circle out of sight, down
+wind, and to gain the other side of the ridge back of the lions. We
+purposed slipping over the ridge and attacking from above. Even this was
+but a slight advantage. The job was a stiff one, for we might expect
+certainly the majority to charge.
+
+Therefore, when we finally deployed in skirmish order and bore down on
+that patch of brush and boulders, we were braced for the shock of
+battle. We found nothing. Our men, however, signalled that the lions had
+not left cover. After a little search, however, we discovered a very
+shallow depression running slantwise up the hill and back of the cover.
+So slight it was that even the glasses had failed to show it from below.
+The lions had in all probability known about us from the start, and
+were all the time engaged in withdrawing after their leisurely fashion.
+
+Of course we hunted for them; in fact, we spent two days at it; but we
+never found trace of them again. The country was too hard for tracking.
+They had left Lucania. Probably by the time we had completed our two
+hours of flanking movement they were five miles away. The presence of
+cubs would account for this. In ordinary circumstances we should have
+had a wonderful and exciting fight. But the sight of those fifteen great
+beasts was one I shall never forget.
+
+After we had hunted Lucania thoroughly we parted company with the Hills,
+and returned to Juja Farm.
+
+
+
+
+PART V.
+
+THE TSAVO RIVER.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XXV.
+
+VOI.
+
+
+Part way up the narrow-gauge railroad from the coast is a station called
+Voi. On his way to the interior the traveller stops there for an evening
+meal. It is served in a high, wide stone room by white-robed Swahilis
+under command of a very efficient and quiet East Indian. The voyager
+steps out into the darkness to look across the way upon the outlines of
+two great rounded hills against an amethyst sky. That is all he ever
+sees of Voi, for on the down trip he passes through it about two o'clock
+in the morning.
+
+At that particularly trying hour F. and I descended, and attempted, by
+the light of lanterns, to sort out twenty safari boys strange to us, and
+miscellaneous camp stores. We did not entirely succeed. Three men were
+carried on down the line, and the fly to our tent was never seen again.
+
+The train disappeared. Our boys, shivering, crept into corners. We took
+possession of the dak-bungalow maintained by the railroad for just such
+travellers as ourselves. It was simply a high stone room, with three
+iron beds, and a corner so cemented that one could pour pails of water
+over one's self without wetting the whole place. The beds were supplied
+with mosquito canopies and strong wire springs. Over these we spread our
+own bedding, and thankfully resumed our slumbers.
+
+The morning discovered to us Voi as the station, the district
+commissioner's house on a distant side hill, and a fairly extensive East
+Indian bazaar. The keepers of the latter traded with the natives.
+Immediately about the station grew some flat shady trees. All else was
+dense thorn scrub pressing close about the town. Opposite were the tall,
+rounded mountains.
+
+Nevertheless, in spite of its appearance, Voi has its importance in the
+scheme of things. From it, crossing the great Serengetti desert, runs
+the track to Kilimanjaro and that part of German East Africa. The
+Germans have as yet no railroad; so they must perforce patronize the
+British line thus far, and then trek across. As the Kilimanjaro
+district is one rich in natives and trade, the track is well used. Most
+of the transport is done by donkeys--either in carts or under the pack
+saddle. As the distance from water to water is very great, the journey
+is a hard one. This fact, and the incidental consideration that from fly
+and hardship the mortality in donkeys is very heavy, pushes the freight
+rates high. And that fact accounts for the motor car, which has been my
+point of aim from the beginning of this paragraph.
+
+The motor car plies between Voi and the German line at exorbitant rates.
+Our plan was to have it take us and some galvanized water tanks out into
+the middle of the desert and dump us down there. So after breakfast we
+hunted up the owner.
+
+He proved to be a very short, thick-set, blond German youth who
+justified Weber and Fields. In fact, he talked so exactly like those
+comedians that my task in visualizing him to you is somewhat lightened.
+If all, instead of merely a majority of my readers, had seen Weber and
+Fields that task would vanish.
+
+We explained our plan, and asked him his price.
+
+"Sefen hundert and feefty rupees,"[11] said he uncompromisingly.
+
+He was abrupt, blunt, and insulting. As we wanted transportation very
+much--though not seven hundred and fifty rupees' worth--we persisted. He
+offered an imperturbable take-it-or-leave-it stolidity. The motor truck
+stood near. I said something technical about the engine; then something
+more. He answered these remarks, though grudgingly. I suggested that it
+took a mighty good driver to motor through this rough country. He
+mentioned a particular hill. I proposed that we should try the station
+restaurant for beer while he told me about it. He grunted, but headed
+for the station.
+
+For two hours we listened to the most blatant boasting. He was a great
+driver; he had driven for M., the American millionaire; for the Chinese
+Ambassador to France; for Grand-Duke Alexis; for the Kaiser himself! We
+learned how he had been the trusted familiar of these celebrities, how
+on various occasions--all detailed at length--he had been treated by
+them as an equal; and he told us sundry sly, slanderous, and disgusting
+anecdotes of these worthies, his forefinger laid one side his nose.
+When we finally got him worked up to the point of going to get some
+excessively bad photographs, "I haf daken myself!" we began to have
+hopes. So we tentatively approached once more the subject of
+transportation.
+
+Then the basis of the trouble came out. One Davis, M.P. from England,
+had also dealt with our friend. Davis, as we reconstructed him, was of
+the blunt type, with probably very little feeling of democracy for those
+in subordinate positions, and with, most certainly, a good deal of
+insular and racial prejudice. Evidently a rather vague bargain had been
+struck, and the motor had set forth. Then ensued financial wranglings
+and disputes as to terms. It ended by useless hauteur on Davis's part,
+and inexcusable but effective action by the German. For Davis found
+himself dumped down on the Serengetti desert and left there.
+
+We heard all this in excruciatingly funny Weberandfieldese, many times
+repeated. The German literally beat his breast and cried aloud against
+Davis. We unblushingly sacrificed a probably perfectly worthy Davis to
+present need, and cried out against him too.
+
+"Am I like one dog?" demanded the German fervently.
+
+"Certainly not," we cried with equal fervour. We both like dogs.
+
+Then followed wearisomely reiterated assurances that we, at least, knew
+how a gentleman should be treated, and more boasting of proud
+connections in the past. But the end of it was a bargain of reasonable
+dimensions for ourselves, our personal boys, and our loads. Under plea
+of starting our safari boys off we left him, and crept, with shattered
+nerves, around the corner of the dak-bungalow. There we lurked, busy at
+pretended affairs, until our friend swaggered away to the Hindu
+quarters, where, it seems, he had his residence.
+
+About ten o'clock a small safari marched in afoot. It had travelled all
+of two nights across the Thirst, and was glad to get there. The single
+white man in charge had been three years alone among the natives near
+Kilimanjaro, and he was now out for a six months' vacation at home. Two
+natives in the uniform of Sudanese troops hovered near him very
+sorrowful. He splashed into the water of the dak-bungalow, and then
+introduced himself. We sat in teakwood easy-chairs and talked all day.
+He was a most interesting, likeable, and cordial man, at any stage of
+the game. The game, by means of French vermouth--of all
+drinks!--progressed steadily. We could hardly blame him for celebrating.
+By the afternoon he wanted to give things away. So insistent was he that
+F. finally accepted an ebony walking-stick, and I an ebony knife inset
+with ivory. If we had been the least bit unscrupulous, I am afraid the
+relatives at home would have missed their African souvenirs. He went out
+_via_ freight car, all by himself, seated regally in a steamer chair
+between two wide-open side doors, one native squatted on either side to
+see that he did not lurch out into the landscape.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[11] Fifty pounds.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI.
+
+THE FRINGE-EARED ORYX.
+
+
+At ten o'clock the following morning we started. On the high front seat,
+under an awning, sat the German, F., and I. The body of the truck was
+filled with safari loads, Memba Sasa, Simba Mohammed, and F.'s boy,
+whose name I have forgotten. The arrangement on the front seat was due
+to a strike on the part of F.
+
+"Look here," said he to me, "you've got to sit next that rotter. We want
+him to bring us back some water from the other side, and I'd break his
+neck in ten minutes. You sit next him and give him your motor car
+patter."
+
+Therefore I took the middle seat and played chorus. The road was not a
+bad one, as natural mountain roads go; I have myself driven worse in
+California. Our man, however, liked to exaggerate all the difficulties,
+and while doing it to point to himself with pride as a perfect wonder.
+Between times he talked elementary mechanics.
+
+"The inflammation of the sparkling plugs?" was one of his expressions
+that did much to compensate.
+
+The country mounted steadily through the densest thorn scrub I have ever
+seen. It was about fifteen feet high, and so thick that its penetration,
+save by made tracks, would have been an absolute impossibility. Our road
+ran like a lane between two spiky jungles. Bold bright mountains cropped
+up, singly and in short ranges, as far as the eye could see them.
+
+This sort of thing for twenty miles--more than a hard day's journey on
+safari. We made it in a little less than two hours; and the breeze of
+our going kept us reasonably cool under our awning. We began to
+appreciate the real value of our diplomacy.
+
+At noon we came upon a series of unexpectedly green and clear small
+hills just under the frown of a sheer rock cliff. This oasis in the
+thorn was occupied by a few scattered native huts and the usual squalid
+Indian dukka, or trading store. At this last our German friend stopped.
+From under the seat he drew out a collapsible table and a basket of
+provisions. These we were invited to share. Diplomacy's highest triumph!
+
+After lunch we surmounted our first steep grade to the top of a ridge.
+This we found to be the beginning of a long elevated plateau sweeping
+gently downward to a distant heat mist, which later experience proved a
+concealment to snowcapped Kilimanjaro. This plateau also looked to be
+covered with scrub. As we penetrated it, however, we found the bushes
+were more or less scattered, while in the wide, shallow dips between the
+undulations were open grassy meadows. There was no water. Isolated
+mountains or peaked hills showed here and there in the illimitable
+spaces, some of them fairly hull down, all of them toilsomely distant.
+This was the Serengetti itself.
+
+In this great extent of country somewhere were game herds. They were
+exceedingly migratory, and nobody knew very much about them. One of the
+species would be the rare and localized fringe-eared oryx. This beast
+was the principal zoological end of our expedition; though, of course,
+as always, we hoped for a chance lion. Geographically we wished to find
+the source of the Swanee River, and to follow that stream down to its
+joining with the Tsavo. About half-past one we passed our safari boys.
+We had intended to stop and replenish their canteens from our
+water-drums; but they told us they had encountered a stray and
+astonishing shower, and did not need more. We left them trudging
+cheerfully across the desert. They had travelled most of the night
+before, would do the same in the night to come, and should reach our
+camping-place about noon of the next day.
+
+We ourselves stopped about four o'clock. In a few hours we had come a
+hard three days' march. Over the side went our goods. We bade the German
+a very affectionate farewell; for he was still to fill our drums from
+one of the streams out of Kilimanjaro and deliver them to us on his
+return trip next day. We then all turned to and made camp. The scrub
+desert here was exactly like the scrub desert for the last sixty miles.
+
+The next morning we were up and off before sunrise. In this job time was
+a very large element of the contract. We must find our fringe-eared oryx
+before our water supply gave out. Therefore we had resolved not to lose
+a moment.
+
+The sunrise was most remarkable--lace work, flat clouds, with burnished
+copper-coloured clouds behind glowing through the lace. We admired it
+for some few moments. Then one of us happened to look higher. There,
+above the sky of the horizon, apparently suspended in mid-air half-way
+to the zenith, hung like delicate bubbles the double snow-cloud peaks of
+Kilimanjaro. Between them and the earth we could apparently see clear
+sky. It was in reality, of course, the blue-heat haze that rarely leaves
+these torrid plains. I have seen many mountains in all parts of the
+world, but none as fantastically insubstantial; as wonderfully lofty; as
+gracefully able to yield, before clouds and storms and sunrise glows,
+all the space in infinity they could possibly use, and yet to tower
+above them serene in an upper space of its own. Nearly every morning of
+our journey to come we enjoyed this wonderful vision for an hour or so.
+Then the mists closed in. The rest of the day showed us a grayish sky
+along the western horizon, with apparently nothing behind it.
+
+In the meantime we were tramping steadily ahead over the desert;
+threading the thorn scrub, crossing the wide shallow grass-grown swales;
+spying about us for signs of game. At the end of three or four miles we
+came across some ostrich and four hartebeeste. This encouraged us to
+think we might find other game soon, for the hartebeeste is a gregarious
+animal. Suddenly we saw a medium-sized squat beast that none of us
+recognized, trundling along like a badger sixty yards ahead. Any
+creature not easily identified is a scientific possibility in Africa.
+Therefore we fired at once. One of the bullets hit his foreleg paw.
+Immediately this astonishing small creature turned and charged us! If
+his size had equalled his ferocity, he would have been a formidable
+opponent. We had a lively few minutes. He rushed us again and again,
+uttering ferocious growls. We had to step high and lively to keep out of
+his way. Between charges he sat down and tore savagely at his wounded
+paw. We wanted him as nearly perfect a specimen as possible, so tried to
+rap him over the head with a club. Owing to remarkably long teeth and
+claws, this was soon proved impracticable; so we shot him. He weighed
+about fifty pounds, and we subsequently learned that he was a honey
+badger, an animal very rarely captured.
+
+We left the boys to take the whole skin and skull of this beast, and
+strolled forward slowly. The brush ended abruptly in a wide valley. It
+had been burnt over, and the new grass was coming up green. We gave one
+look, and sank back into cover.
+
+The sparse game of the immediate vicinity had gathered to this fresh
+feed. A herd of hartebeeste and gazelle were grazing, and five giraffe
+adorned the sky-line. But what interested us especially was a group of
+about fifty cob-built animals with the unmistakable rapier horns of the
+oryx. We recognized them as the rarity we desired.
+
+The conditions were most unfavourable. The cover nearest them gave a
+range of three hundred yards, and even this would bring them directly
+between us and the rising sun. There was no help for it, however. We
+made our way to the bushes nearest the herd, and I tried to align the
+blurs that represented my sights. At the shot, ineffective, they raced
+to the right across our front. We lay low. As they had seen nothing they
+wheeled and stopped after two hundred yards of flight. This shift had
+brought the light into better position. Once more I could define my
+sights. From the sitting position I took careful aim at the largest
+buck. He staggered twenty feet and fell dead. The distance was just 381
+paces. This shot was indeed fortunate, for we saw no more fringe-eared
+oryx.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII.
+
+ACROSS THE SERENGETTI.
+
+
+We arrived in camp about noon, almost exhausted with the fierce heat and
+a six hours' tramp, to find our German friend awaiting us. By an irony
+of fate the drums of water he had brought back with him were now
+unnecessary; we had our oryx. However, we wearily gave him lunch and
+listened to his prattle, and finally sped him on his way, hoping never
+to see him again.
+
+About three o'clock our men came in. We doled out water rations, and
+told them to rest in preparation for the morrow.
+
+Late that night we were awakened by a creaking and snorting and the
+flash of torches passing. We looked out, to see a donkey transport
+toiling slowly along, travelling thus at night to avoid the terrific day
+heats. The two-wheeled carts with their wild and savage drivers looked
+very picturesque in the flickering lights. We envied them vaguely their
+defined route that permitted night travel, and sank to sleep.
+
+In the morning, however, we found they had left with us new
+responsibilities in the shape of an elderly Somali, very sick, and down
+with the fever. This was indeed a responsibility. It was manifestly
+impossible for us to remain there with him; we should all die of thirst.
+It was equally impossible to take him with us, for he was quite unfit to
+travel under the sun. Finally, as the best solution of a bad business,
+we left him five gallons of water, some food, and some quinine, together
+with the advice to rest until night, and then to follow his companions
+along the beaten track. What between illness and wild beasts his chances
+did not look very good, but it was the best we could do for him. This
+incident exemplifies well the cruelty of this singular people. They
+probably abandoned the old man because his groans annoyed them, or
+because one of them wanted to ride in his place on the donkey cart.[12]
+
+We struck off as early as possible through the thorn scrub on a compass
+bearing that we hoped would bring us to a reported swamp at the head of
+the Swanee River. The Swanee River was one of the sources of the Tsavo.
+Of course this was guesswork. We did not know certainly the location of
+the swamp, its distance from us, nor what lay between us and it.
+However, we loaded all our transportable vessels with water, and set
+forth.
+
+The scrub was all alike; sometimes thinner, sometimes thicker. We
+marched by compass until we had raised a conical hill above the horizon,
+and then we bore just to the left of that. The surface of the ground was
+cut by thousands of game tracks. They were all very old, however, made
+after a rain; and it was evident the game herds venture into this
+country only when it contains rainwater. After two hours, however, we
+did see one solitary hartebeeste, whom we greeted as an old friend in
+desolation. Shortly afterwards we ran across one oribi, which I shot for
+our own table.
+
+At the end of two hours we sat down. The safari of twenty men was a very
+miscellaneous lot, consisting of the rag-tag-and-bobtail of the bazaars
+picked up in a hurry. They were soft and weak, and they straggled badly.
+The last weakling--prodded along by one of our two askaris--limped in
+only at the end of half an hour. Then we took a new start.
+
+The sun was by now up and hot. The work was difficult enough at best,
+but the weight of the tropics was now cast in the scale. Twice more
+within the next two hours we stopped to let every one catch up. Each
+time this required a longer interval. In the thorn it was absolutely
+essential to keep in touch with every member of the party. A man once
+lost would likely remain so, for we could not afford to endanger all for
+the sake of one.
+
+Time wore on until noon. Had it not been for a thin film of haze that
+now overspread the sky, I think the sun would have proved too much for
+some of the men. Four or five straggled so very badly that we finally
+left them in charge of one of our two askaris, with instructions to
+follow on as fast as they could. In order to make this possible, we were
+at pains to leave a well-marked trail.
+
+After this fashion, slowly, and with growing anxiety for some of the
+men, we drew up on our landmark hill. There our difficulties increased;
+the thorn brush thickened. Only by a series of short zigzags, and by
+taking advantage of every rhino trail going in our direction, could we
+make our way through it at all; while to men carrying burdens on their
+heads the tangle aloft must have been fairly maddening. So slow did our
+progress necessarily become, and so difficult was it to keep in touch
+with everybody, that F. and I finally halted for consultation. It was
+decided that I should push on ahead with Memba Sasa to make certain that
+we were not on the wrong line, while F. and the askaris struggled with
+the safari.
+
+Therefore I took my compass bearing afresh, and plunged into the scrub.
+The sensation was of hitting solid ground after a long walk through
+sand. We seemed fairly to shoot ahead and out of sight. Whenever we came
+upon earth we marked it deeply with our heels; we broke twigs downwards,
+and laid hastily-snatched bunches of grass to help the trail we were
+leaving for the others to follow. This, in spite of our compass, was a
+very devious track. Besides, the thorn bushes were patches of spiky aloe
+coming into red flower, and the spears of sisal.
+
+After an hour's steady, swift walking the general trend of the country
+began to slope downwards. This argued a watercourse between us and the
+hills around Kilimanjaro. There could be no doubt that we would cut it;
+the only question was whether it, like so many desert watercourses,
+might not prove empty. We pushed on the more rapidly. Then we caught a
+glimpse through a chance opening, of the tops of trees below us. After
+another hour we suddenly burst from the scrub to a strip of green grass
+beyond which were the great trees, the palms, and the festooned vines of
+a watercourse. Two bush bucks plunged into the thicket as we approached,
+and fifteen or twenty mongooses sat up as straight and stiff as so many
+picket pins the better to see us.
+
+For a moment my heart sank. The low undergrowth beneath the trees
+apparently swept unbroken from where we stood to the low bank opposite.
+It was exactly like the shallow, damp but waterless ravines at home,
+filled with black berry vines. We pushed forward, however, and found
+ourselves looking down on a smooth, swift flowing stream.
+
+It was not over six feet wide, grown close with vines and grasses, but
+so very deep and swift and quiet that an extraordinary volume of water
+passed, as through an artificial aqueduct. Furthermore, unlike most
+African streams, it was crystal clear. We plunged our faces and wrists
+in it, and took long, thankful draughts. It was all most grateful after
+the scorching desert. The fresh trees meeting in canopy overhead were
+full of monkeys and bright birds; festooned vines swung their great
+ropes here and there; long heavy grass carpeted underfoot.
+
+After we had rested a few minutes we filled our empty canteens, and
+prepared to start back for our companions. But while I stood there,
+Memba Sasa--good, faithful Memba Sasa--seized both canteens and darted
+away.
+
+"Lie down!" he shouted back at me, "I will go back."
+
+Without protest--which would have been futile anyway--I sank down on the
+grass. I was very tired. A little breeze followed the watercourse; the
+grass was soft; I would have given anything for a nap. But in wild
+Africa a nap is not healthy; so I drowsily watched the mongooses that
+had again come out of seclusion, and the monkeys, and the birds. At the
+end of a long time, and close to sundown, I heard voices. A moment later
+F., Memba Sasa, and about three-quarters of the men came in. We all,
+white and black, set to work to make camp. Then we built smudges and
+fired guns in the faint hope of guiding in the stragglers. As a matter
+of fact we had not the slightest faith in these expedients. Unless the
+men were hopelessly lost they should be able to follow our trail. They
+might be almost anywhere out in that awful scrub. The only course open
+to them would be to climb thorn trees for the night. Next day we would
+organize a formal search for them.
+
+In the meantime, almost dead from exhaustion, we sprawled about
+everywhere. The men, too dispirited even to start their own camp-fires,
+sat around resting as do boxers between rounds. Then to us came Memba
+Sasa, who had already that day made a double journey, and who should
+have been the most tired of all.
+
+"Bwana," said he, "if you will lend me Winchi,[13] and a lantern, I will
+bring in the men."
+
+We lent him his requirements, and he departed. Hours later he returned,
+carefully leaned "Winchi" in the corner of the tent, deposited the
+lantern, and stood erect at attention.
+
+"Well, Memba Sasa," I inquired.
+
+"The men are here."
+
+"They were far?"
+
+"Very far."
+
+"Verna, Memba Sasa, assanti sana."[14]
+
+That was his sole--and sufficient--reward.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[12] I have just heard that this old man survived, and has been singing
+our praises in Nairobi as the saviour of his life.
+
+[13] His name for the.405 Winchester.
+
+[14] "Very good, Memba Sasa, thanks very much."
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII.
+
+DOWN THE RIVER.
+
+
+Relieved now of all anxiety as to water, we had merely to make our way
+downstream. First, however, there remained the interesting task of
+determining its source.
+
+Accordingly next day we and our gunbearers left the boys to a
+well-earned rest, and set out upstream. At first we followed the edge of
+the river jungle, tramping over hard hot earth, winding in and out of
+growths of thorn scrub and brilliant aloes. We saw a herd of impallas
+gliding like phantoms; and as we stood in need of meat, I shot at one of
+them but missed. The air was very hot and moist. At five o'clock in the
+morning the thermometer had stood at 78 degrees; and by noon it had
+mounted to 106 degrees. In addition the atmosphere was filled with the
+humidity that later in the day was to break in extraordinary deluges.
+We moved slowly, but even then our garments were literally dripping wet.
+
+At the end of three miles the stream bed widened. We came upon
+beautiful, spacious, open lawns of from eighty to one hundred acres
+apiece, separated from each other by narrow strips of tall forest trees.
+The grass was high, and waved in the breeze like planted grain; the
+boundary trees resembled artificial wind-breaks of eucalyptus or
+Normandy poplar. One might expect a white ranch house beyond some low
+clump of trees, and chicken runs, and corrals.
+
+Along these apparent boundaries of forest trees our stream divided, and
+divided again, so that we were actually looking upon what we had come to
+seek--the source of the Swanee branch of the Tsavo River. In these
+peaceful, protected meadows was it cradled. From them it sprang full
+size out into the African wilderness.
+
+A fine impalla buck grazed in one of these fields. I crept as near him
+as I could behind one of the wind-break rows of trees. It was not very
+near, and for the second time I missed. Thereupon we decided two things:
+that we were not really meat hungry, and that yesterday's hard work was
+not conducive to to-day's good shooting.
+
+Having thus accomplished the second object of our expedition, we
+returned to camp. From that time begins a regular sequence of events on
+which I look back with the keenest of pleasure. The two constant factors
+were the river and the great dry country on either side. Day after day
+we followed down the one, and we made brief excursions out into the
+other. Each night we camped near the sound of the swift running water,
+where the winds rustled in the palms, the acacias made lacework across
+the skies, and the jungle crouched in velvet blackness close to earth
+like a beast.
+
+Our life in its routine was regular; in its details bizarre and full of
+the unexpected. Every morning we arose an hour before day, and ate by
+lantern light and the gleam of fires. At the first gray we were afoot
+and on the march. F. and I, with our gunbearers, then pushed ahead down
+the river, leaving the men to come along as fast or as slowly as they
+pleased. After about six hours or so of marching, we picked out a good
+camp site, and lay down to await the safari. By two o'clock in the
+afternoon camp was made. Also it was very hot. After a light lunch we
+stripped to the skin, lay on our cots underneath the mosquito canopies,
+and tried to doze or read. The heat at this time of day was blighting.
+About four o'clock, if we happened to be inspired by energy, one or the
+other of us strolled out at right angles to the stream to see what we
+could see. The evening was tepid and beautiful. Bathed and pyjama-clad
+we lolled in our canvas chairs, smoking, chatting or listening to the
+innumerable voices of the night.
+
+Such was the simple and almost invariable routine of our days. But
+enriching it, varying it, disguising it even--as rain-squalls, sunshine
+cloud shadow, and unexpected winds modify the landscape so well known
+from a study window--were the incredible incidents and petty adventures
+of African travel.
+
+The topography of the river itself might be divided very roughly into
+three: the headwater country down to its junction with the Tsavo the
+palm-elephant-grass stretch, and the gorge and hill district just before
+it crosses the rail road.
+
+The headwater country is most beautiful The stream is not over ten feet
+wide, but very deep, swift, and clear. It flows between defined banks
+and is set in a narrow strip of jungle. In places the bed widens out to
+a carpet of the greenest green grass sown with flowers; at other places
+it offers either mysterious thickets, spacious cathedrals, or snug
+bowers. Immediately beyond the edge of this river jungle begins the
+thorn scrub, more or less dense. Distant single mountains or buttes
+serve as landmarks in a brush-grown, gently rising, strongly rolling
+country. Occasional alluvial flats draw back to low cliffs not over
+twenty feet high.
+
+After the junction of the Tsavo, palms of various sorts replace to a
+large extent the forest trees. Naturally also the stream widens and
+flows more slowly. Outside the palms grow tall elephant-grass and bush.
+Our marching had generally to be done in the narrow, neutral space
+between these two growths. It was pleasant enough, with the river
+snatching at the trailing branches, and the birds and animals rustling
+away. Beyond the elephant-grass flats low ridges ran down to the river,
+varying in width, but carrying always with them the dense thorn. Between
+them ran recesses, sometimes three or four hundred acres in extent, high
+with elephant-grass or little trees like alders. So much for the
+immediate prospect on our right as we marched. Across the river to our
+left were huge riven mountains, with great cliffs and canons. As we
+followed necessarily every twist and turn of the river, sometimes these
+mountains were directly ahead of us, then magically behind, so that we
+thought we had passed them by. But the next hour threw them again across
+our trail. The ideal path would, of course, have cut across all the
+bends and ridges; but the thorn of the ridges and the elephant-grass of
+the flats forbade it. So we marched ten miles to gain four.
+
+After days of struggle and deception we passed those mountains. Then we
+entered a new type of country where the Tsavo ran in canons between
+hills. The high cliffs often towered far above us; we had to pick our
+way along narrow river ledges; again the river ran like a trout stream
+over riffles and rapids, while we sauntered along cleared banks beneath
+the trees. Had we not been making a forced march under terrific heat at
+just that time, this last phase of the river might have been the
+pleasantest of all.
+
+Throughout the whole course of our journey the rhinoceros was the most
+abundant of the larger animals. The indications of old tracks proved
+that at some time of the year, or under some different conditions, great
+herds of the more gregarious plains antelope and zebra visited the
+river, but at the time of our visit they were absent. The rhinoceroses,
+however, in incredible numbers came regularly to water. Paradoxically,
+we saw very few of them, and enjoyed comparative immunity from their
+charges. This was due to the fact that their habits and ours swung in
+different orbits. The rhinoceros, after drinking, took to the hot, dry
+thorn scrub in the low hills; and as he drank at night, we rarely
+encountered him in the river bottoms where we were marching. This was
+very lucky, for the cover was so dense that a meeting must necessarily
+be at close quarters. Indeed these large and truculent beasts were
+rather a help than a hindrance, for we often made use of their wide,
+clear paths to penetrate some particularly distressing jungle. However,
+we had several small adventures with them: just enough to keep us alert
+in rounding corners or approaching bushes--and nine-tenths of our travel
+was bushes and corners. The big, flat footsteps, absolutely fresh in the
+dust, padded methodically ahead of us down the only way until it seemed
+that we could not fail to plump upon their maker around the next bend.
+We crept forward foot by foot, every sense alert, finger on trigger.
+Then after a time the spoor turned off to the right, towards the hills.
+We straightened our backs and breathed a sigh of relief. This happened
+over and over again. At certain times of year also elephants frequent
+the banks of the Tsavo in considerable numbers We saw many old signs,
+and once came upon the fresh path of a small herd. The great beasts had
+passed by that very morning. We gazed with considerable awe on limbs
+snatched bodily from trees; on flat-topped acacias a foot in diameter
+pulled up by the roots and stood up side down; on tree trunks twisted
+like ropes.
+
+Of the game by far the most abundant were the beautiful red impalla. We
+caught glimpses of their graceful bodies gliding in and out of sight
+through the bushes; or came upon them standing in small openings, their
+delicate ears pointed to us. They and the tiny dikdik furnished our
+table; and an occasional water-buck satisfied the men. One day we came
+on one of the latter beasts sound asleep in a tiny open space. He was
+lying down, and his nose rested against the earth just like a very old
+family horse in a paddock.
+
+Besides these common species were bush-buck wart-hog, lesser kudu,
+giraffe, and leopard. The bush-buck we jumped occasionally quite near at
+hand. They ducked their heads low and rushed tearingly to the next
+cover. The leopard was heard sighing every night, and saw their pad
+marks next day; but only twice did we catch glimpses of them. One
+morning we came upon the fresh-killed carcass of a female lesser kudu
+from which, evidently, we had driven the slayer.
+
+These few species practically completed the game list. They were
+sufficient for our needs; and the lesser kudu was a prize much desired
+for our collection. But by far the most interesting to me were the
+smaller animals, the birds, and the strange, innumerable insects.
+
+We saw no natives in the whole course of our journey.
+
+The valley of the river harboured many monkeys. They seemed to be of two
+species, blue and brown, but were equally noisy and amusing. They
+retired ahead of our advance with many remarks, or slipped past us to
+the rear without any comments whatever. When we made camp they retired
+with indignant protests, and when we had quite settled down they
+returned as near as they dared.
+
+One very hot afternoon I lay on my canvas cot in the open, staring
+straight upward into the overarching greenery of the trees. This is a
+very pleasant thing to do. The beautiful up-spreading, outstretching of
+the tree branches and twigs intrigue the eye; the leaves make
+fascinating, hypnotically waving patterns against a very blue sky; and
+in the chambers and galleries of the upper world the birds and insects
+carry on varied businesses of their own. After a time the corner of my
+eye caught a quick movement far to the left and in a shadow. At once I
+turned my attention that way. After minute scrutiny I at length made out
+a monkey. Evidently considering himself quite unobserved, he was slowly
+and with great care stalking our camp. Inch by inch he moved, taking
+skilful advantage of every bit of cover, flattening himself along the
+limbs, hunching himself up behind bunches of leaves, until he had gained
+a big limb directly overhead. There he stretched flat, staring down at
+the scene that had so strongly aroused his curiosity. I lay there for
+over two hours reading and dozing. My friend aloft never stirred. When
+dusk fell he was still there. Some time after dark he must have regained
+his band, for in the morning the limb was vacant.
+
+Now comes the part of this story that really needs a witness, not to
+veracity perhaps, but to accuracy of observations. Fortunately I have F.
+About noon next day the monkey returned to his point of observation. He
+used the same precautions as to concealment; he followed his route of
+the day before; he proceeded directly to his old conning tower on the
+big limb. It did not take him quite so long to get there, for he had
+already scouted out the trail. _And close at his heels followed two
+other monkeys_! They crawled where he crawled; they crouched where he
+crouched; they hid where he hid; they flattened themselves out by him on
+the big limb, and all three of them passed the afternoon gazing down on
+the strange and fascinating things below. Whether these newcomers were
+part of the first one's family out for a treat, or whether they were
+Cook's Tourists of the Jungle in charge of my friend's competence as a
+guide, I do not know.
+
+Farther down the river F. and I stopped for some time to watch the
+crossing of forty-odd of the little blue monkeys. The whole band
+clambered to near the top of a tall tree growing by the water's edge.
+There, one by one, they ran out on a straight overhanging limb and cast
+themselves into space. On the opposite bank of the river, and leaning
+well out, grew a small springy bush. Each monkey landed smash in the
+middle of this, clasped it with all four hands, swayed alarmingly,
+recovered, and scampered ashore. It was rather a nice problem in
+ballistics this, for a mistake in calculation of a foot in distance or
+a pound in push would land Mr. Monkey in the water. And the joke of it
+was that directly beneath that bush lay two hungry-looking crocodiles!
+As each tiny body hurtled through the air I'll swear a look of hope came
+into the eyes of those crocs. We watched until the last had made his
+leap. There were no mistakes. The joke was against the crocodiles.
+
+We encountered quite a number of dog-faced baboons. These big apes
+always retreated very slowly and noisily. Scouts in the rearguard were
+continually ascending small trees or bushes for a better look at us,
+then leaping down to make disparaging remarks. One lot seemed to show
+such variation in colour from the usual that we shot one. The distance
+was about two hundred and fifty yards. Immediately the whole band--a
+hundred or so strong--dropped on all fours and started in our direction.
+This was rather terrifying. However, as we stood firm, they slowly came
+to a halt at about seventy yards, barked and chattered for a moment,
+then hopped away to right and left.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX.
+
+THE LESSER KUDU.
+
+
+About eight o'clock, the evening of our first day on the Swanee, the
+heat broke in a tropical downpour. We heard it coming from a long
+distance, like the roar of a great wind. The velvet blackness, star
+hung, was troubled by an invisible blurring mist, evidenced only through
+a subtle effect on the subconsciousness. Every leaf above us, in the
+circle of our firelight, depended absolutely motionless from its stem.
+The insects had ceased their shrilling; the night birds their chirping;
+the animals, great and small, their callings or their stealthy rustling
+to and fro. Of the world of sound there remained only the crackling of
+our fires, the tiny singing of the blood in our ears, and that far-off
+portentous roar. Our simple dispositions were made. Trenches had been
+dug around the tents; the pegs had been driven well home; our stores had
+been put in shelter. We waited silently, puffing away our pipes.
+
+The roaring increased in volume. Beneath it we began to hear the long,
+rolling crash of thunder. Overhead the stars, already dimmed, were
+suddenly blotted from existence. Then came the rain, in a literal
+deluge, as though the god of floods had turned over an entire reservoir
+with one twist of his mighty hand. Our fire went out instantly; the
+whole world went out with it. We lay on our canvas cots unable to see a
+foot beyond our tent opening; unable to hear anything but the insistent,
+terrible drumming over our heads; unable to think of anything through
+the tumult of waters. As a man's body might struggle from behind a
+waterfall through the torrents, so our imaginations, half drowned,
+managed dimly to picture forth little bits--the men huddled close in
+their tiny tents, their cowled blankets over their heads. All the rest
+of the universe had gone.
+
+After a time the insistent beat and rush of waters began to wear through
+our patience. We willed that this wracking tumult should cease; we
+willed it with all the force that was in us. Then, as this proved vain,
+we too humped our spiritual backs, cowled our souls with patience, and
+waited dumbly for the force of the storm to spend itself. Our faculties
+were quite as effectually drowned out by the unceasing roar and crash of
+the waters as our bodily comfort would have been had we lacked the
+protection of our tent.
+
+Abruptly the storm passed. It did not die away slowly in the diminuendo
+of ordinary storms. It ceased as though the reservoir had been tipped
+back again. The rapid _drip_, _drip_, _drip_ of waters now made the
+whole of sound; all the rest of the world lay breathless. Then, inside
+our tent, a cricket struck up bravely.
+
+This homely, cheerful little sound roused us. We went forth to count
+damages and to put our house in order. The men hunted out dry wood and
+made another fire; the creatures of the jungle and the stars above them
+ventured forth.
+
+Next morning we marched into a world swept clean. The ground was as
+smooth as though a new broom had gone over it. Every track now was
+fresh, and meant an animal near at hand. The bushes and grasses were
+hung with jewels. Merry little showers shook down from trees sharing a
+joke with some tiny wind. White steam rose from a moist, fertile-looking
+soil. The smell of greenhouses was in the air. Looking back, we were
+stricken motionless by the sight of Kilimanjaro, its twin peaks
+suspended a clean blue sky, fresh snow mantling its shoulders.
+
+This day, so cheeringly opened, was destined to fulfil its promise. In
+the dense scrub dwell a shy and rare animal called the lesser kudu
+specimens of which we greatly desired. The beast keeps to the thickest
+and driest cove where it is impossible to see fifty yards ahead but
+where the slightest movement breaks the numberless dry interlacements of
+which the place seems made. To move really quietly one could not cover
+over a half-mile in an hour. As the countryside extends a thousand
+square miles or more, and the lesser kudu is rare, it can be seen that
+hunting them might have to be a slow and painful process. We had twice
+seen the peculiar tracks.
+
+On this morning, however, we caught a glimpse of the beast itself. A
+flash of gray, with an impression of the characteristic harness-like
+stripes--that was all. The trail, in the ground, was of course very
+plain. I left the others and followed it into the brush. As usual the
+thorn scrub was so thick that I had to stoop and twist to get through it
+at all, and so brittle that the least false move made a crackling like a
+fire. The rain of the night before had, however, softened the _debris_
+lying on the ground. I moved forward as quickly as I could, half
+suffocated in the steaming heat of the dense thicket. After three or
+four hundred yards the beast fell into a walk, so I immediately halted.
+I reasoned that after a few steps at this gait he would look back to see
+whether or not he was followed. If his scouting showed him nothing he
+might throw off suspicion. After ten minutes I crept forward again. The
+spoor showed my surmises to be correct, for I came to where the animal
+had turned, behind a small bush, and had stood for a few minutes. Taking
+up the tracks from this point, I was delighted to find that the kudu had
+forgotten its fear, and was browsing. At the end of five minutes more of
+very careful work, I was fortunate enough to see it, feeding from the
+top of a small bush thirty-five yards away. The raking shot from the
+Springfield dropped it in its tracks.
+
+It proved to be a doe, a great prize of course, but not to be compared
+with the male. We skinned her carefully, and moved on, delighted to have
+the species.
+
+Our luck was not over, however. At the end of six hours we picked our
+camp in a pretty grove by the swift-running stream. There we sat down
+to await the safari. The tree-tops were full of both the brown and blue
+monkeys, baboons barked at us from a distance, the air was musical with
+many sweet birds. Big thunder-clouds were gathering around the horizon.
+
+The safari came in. Mohammed immediately sought us out to report, in
+great excitement, that he had seen five kudu across the stream. He
+claimed to have watched them even after the safari had passed, and that
+they had not been alarmed. The chance was slight that the kudu could be
+found, but still it was a chance. Accordingly we rather reluctantly gave
+up our plans for a loaf and a nap. Mohammed said the place was an hour
+back; we had had six hours march already. However, about two o'clock we
+set out. Before we had arrived quite at the spot we caught a glimpse of
+the five kudu as they dashed across a tiny opening ahead of us. They had
+moved downstream and crossed the river.
+
+It seemed rather hopeless to follow them into that thick country once
+they had been alarmed, but the prize was great. Therefore Memba Sasa and
+I took up the trail. We crept forward a mile, very quiet, very
+tense--very sweaty. Then simultaneously, through a chance opening and a
+long distance away, we caught a patch of gray with a single transverse
+white stripe. There was no chance to ascertain the sex of the beast, nor
+what part of its anatomy was thus exposed. I took a bull's eye chance on
+that patch of gray; had the luck to hit it in the middle. The animal
+went down. Memba Sasa leapt forward like a madman; I could not begin to
+keep pace with him. When I had struggled through the thorn, I found him
+dancing with delight.
+
+"Monuome, bwana! buck, master!" he cried as soon as he saw me, and made
+a spiral gesture in imitation of the male's beautiful corkscrew horns.
+
+While the men prepared the trophy, F. and I followed on after the other
+four to see what they would do, and speedily came to the conclusion that
+we were lucky to land two of the wily beasts. The four ran compactly
+together and in a wide curve for several hundred yards. Then two faced
+directly back, while the other two, one on either side, made a short
+detour out and back to guard the flanks.
+
+We did not get back to camp until after dark. A tremendous pair of
+electric storms were volleying and roaring at each other across the
+space of night; leopards were crying; a pack of wild dogs were barking
+vociferously. The camp, as we approached it, was a globe of light in a
+bower of darkness. The fire, shining and flickering on the under sides
+of the leaves, lent them a strangely unreal stage-like appearance; the
+porters, their half-naked bodies and red blankets catching the blaze,
+roasted huge chunks of meat over little fires.
+
+We ate a belated supper in comfort, peace, and satisfaction. Then the
+storms joined forces and fell upon us.
+
+
+
+
+XXX.
+
+ADVENTURES BY THE WAY.
+
+
+We journeyed slowly on down the stream. Interesting things happened to
+us. The impressions of that journey are of two sorts: the little
+isolated details and the general background of our day's routine, with
+the gray dawn, the great heats of the day, the blessed evening and its
+fireflies; the thundering of heaven's artillery, and the downpour of
+torrents; the hot, high, crackling thorn scrub into which we made
+excursions; the swift-flowing river with its palms and jungles;
+outleaning palms trailing their fronds just within the snatch of the
+flood waters; wide flats in the embrace of the river bends, or extending
+into the low hills, grown thick with lush green and threaded with
+rhinoceros paths; the huge sheer cliff mountains over the way; distant
+single hills far down. The mild discomfort of the start before daylight
+clearly revealed the thorns and stumbling blocks; the buoyant
+cheerfulness of the first part of the day, with the grouse rocketing
+straight up out of the elephant grass, the birds singing everywhere, and
+the beasts of the jungle still a-graze at the edges; the growing weight
+of the sun, as though a great pressing hand were laid upon the
+shoulders; the suffocating, gasping heat of afternoon, and the;
+gathering piling black and white clouds; the cool evening in pyjamas
+with the fireflies flickering; among the bushes, the river singing, and
+little; breezes wandering like pattering raindrops in the dry palm
+leaves--all these, by repetition of main elements, blend in my memory to
+form a single image. To be sure each day the rock pinnacles over the way
+changed slightly their compass bearings, and little variations of
+contour lent variety to the procession of days. But in essentials they
+were of one kin.
+
+But here and there certain individual scenes and incidents stand out
+clearly and alone. Without reference to my notebook I could not tell you
+their chronological order, nor the days of their happening. They
+occurred, without correlation.
+
+Thus one afternoon at the loafing hour, when F. was sound asleep under
+his mosquito bar, and I in my canvas chair was trying to catch the
+breeze from an approaching deluge, to me came a total stranger in a
+large turban. He was without arms or baggage of any sort, an alien in a
+strange and savage country.
+
+"Jambo, bwana m'kubwa (greeting, great master)!" said he.
+
+"Jambo," said I, as though his existence were not in the least
+surprising, and went on reading. This showed him that I was indeed a
+great master.
+
+After a suitable interval I looked up.
+
+"Wataka neenee (what do you want)?" I demanded.
+
+"Nataka sema qua heri (I want to say good-bye)," said this astonishing
+individual.
+
+I had, until that moment, been quite unaware of his existence. As he had
+therefore not yet said "How do you do," I failed to fathom his reasons
+for wanting to say "good-bye." However, far be it from me to deny any
+one innocent pleasure, so I gravely bade him good-bye, and he
+disappeared into the howling wilderness whence he had come.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One afternoon we came upon two lemurs seated gravely side by side on a
+horizontal limb ten feet up a thorn tree. They contemplated us with the
+preternatural gravity of very young children, and without the slightest
+sign of fear. We coveted them as pets for Billy, but soon discovered
+that their apparent tameness was grounded on good, solid common sense.
+The thorns of that thorn tree! We left them sitting upright, side by
+side.
+
+A little farther on, and up a dry earthy hillside, a medium-sized beast
+leapt from an eroded place fairly under my feet and made off with a
+singularly familiar kiyi. It was a strange-looking animal, apparently
+brick red in colour. When I had collected myself I saw it was a wild
+dog. It had been asleep in a warm hollow of red clay, and had not
+awakened until I was fairly upon it. We had heard these beasts nearly
+every night, but this was the first we had seen. Some days later we came
+upon the entire pack drinking at the river. They leapt suddenly across
+our front eighty yards away, their heads all turned towards us
+truculently, barking at us like so many watch dogs. They made off, but
+not as though particularly alarmed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One afternoon I had wounded a good wart-hog across the river, and had
+gone downstream to find a dry way over. F., more enthusiastic, had
+plunged in and promptly attacked the wart-hog. He was armed with the
+English service revolver shooting the.455 Ely cartridge. It is a very
+short, stubby bit of ammunition. I had often cast doubt on its driving
+power as compared to the.45 Colt, for example. F., as a loyal
+Englishman, had, of course, defended his army's weapon. When I reached
+the centre of disturbance I found that F. had emptied his revolver three
+times--eighteen shots--into the head and forequarters of that wart-hog
+without much effect. Incidentally the wart-hog had given him a good
+lively time, charging again and again. The weapon has not nearly the
+shock power of even our.38 service--a cartridge classified as too light
+for serious business.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One afternoon I gave my shotgun to one of the porters to carry afield,
+remarking facetiously to all and sundry that he looked like a gunbearer.
+After twenty minutes we ran across a rhinoceros. I spent some time
+trying to manoeuvre into position for a photograph of the beast.
+However, the attempt failed. We managed to dodge his rush. Then, after
+the excitement had died, we discovered the porter and the shotgun up a
+tree. He descended rather shamefaced. Nobody said anything about it. A
+half-hour later we came upon another rhinoceros. The beast was visible
+at some distance, and downhill. Nevertheless the porter moved a little
+nearer a tree. This was too much for Memba Sasa. All the rest of the
+afternoon he "ragged" that porter in much the same terms we would have
+employed in the same circumstances.
+
+"That place ahead," said he, "looks like a good place for rhinoceros.
+Perhaps you'd better climb a tree."
+
+"There is a dikdik; a bush is big enough to climb for him."
+
+"Are you afraid of jackals, too?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The fireflies were our regular evening companions. We caught one or two
+of them for the pleasure of watching them alternately igniting and
+extinguishing their little lamps. Even when we put them in a bottle they
+still kept up their performance bravely.
+
+But besides them we had an immense variety of evening visitors. Beetles
+of the most inconceivable shapes and colours, all sorts of moths, and
+numberless strange things--leaf insects, walking-stick insects (exactly
+like dry twigs), and the fierce, tall, praying mantis with their mock
+air of meekness and devotion. Let one of the other insects stray within
+reach and their piety was quickly enough abandoned! One beetle about
+three-eighths of an inch across was oblong in shape and of pure
+glittering gold. His wing covers, on the other hand, were round and
+transparent. The effect was of a jewel under a tiny glass case. Other
+beetles were of red dotted with black, or of black dotted with red; they
+sported stripes, or circles of plain colours; they wore long, slender
+antennae, or short knobby horns; they carried rapiers or pinchers, long
+legs or short. In fact they ran the gamut of grace and horror, so that
+an inebriate would find here a great rest for the imagination.
+
+After we had gone to bed we noticed more pleasantly our cricket. He
+piped up, you may remember, the night of the first great storm. That
+evening he took up his abode in some fold or seam of our tent, and there
+stayed throughout all the rest of the journey. Every evening he tuned up
+cheerfully, and we dropped to sleep to the sound of his homelike piping.
+We grew very fond of him, as one does of everything in this wild and
+changing country that can represent a stable point of habitude.
+
+Nor must I forget one evening when all of a sudden out of the darkness
+came a tremendous hollow booming, like the beating of war drums or the
+bellowing of some strange great beast. At length we identified the
+performer as an unfamiliar kind of frog!
+
+
+
+
+XXXI.
+
+THE LOST SAFARI.
+
+
+We were possessed of a map of sorts, consisting mostly of wide blank
+spaces, with an occasional tentative mountain, or the probable course of
+streams marked thereon. The only landmark that interested us was a
+single round peak situated south of our river and at a point just before
+we should cross the railroad at Tsavo Station. There came a day when,
+from the top of a hill where we had climbed for the sake of the outlook,
+we thought we recognized that peak. It was about five miles away as the
+crow flies.
+
+Then we returned to camp and made the fatal mistake of starting to
+figure. We ought to cover the distance, even with the inevitable twists
+and turns, in a day; the tri-weekly train passed through Tsavo the
+following night; if we could catch that we would save a two days' wait
+for the next train. You follow the thought. We arose very early the
+next morning to get a good start on our forced march.
+
+There is no use in spinning out a sad tale. We passed what we thought
+must be our landmark hill just eleven times. The map showed only one
+butte; as a matter of fact there were dozens. At each disappointment we
+had to reconstruct our theories. It is the nature of man to do this
+hopefully--Tsavo Station must be just around the _next_ bend. We marched
+six hours without pause; then began to save ourselves a little. By all
+the gods of logical reasoning we _proved_ Tsavo just beyond a certain
+fringe of woods. When we arrived we found that there the river broke
+through a range of hills by way of a deep gorge. It was a change from
+the everlasting scrub, with its tumbling waters, its awful cliffs, its
+luxuriant tropical growths; but it was so much the more difficult to
+make our way through. Beyond the gorge we found any amount of hills,
+kopjes, buttes, sugar loaves, etc., each isolated from its fellows, each
+perfectly competent to serve as the map's single landmark.
+
+We should have camped, but we were very anxious to catch that train; and
+we were convinced that now, after all that work, Tsavo could not be far
+away. It would be ridiculous and mortifying to find we had camped
+almost within sight of our destination!
+
+The heat was very bad and the force of the sun terrific. It seemed to
+possess actual physical weight, and to press us down from above. We
+filled our canteens many times at the swift-running stream, and emptied
+them as often. By two o'clock F. was getting a little wobbly from the
+sun. We talked of stopping, when an unexpected thunder shower rolled out
+from behind the mountains, and speedily overcast the entire heavens.
+This shadow relieved the stress. F., much revived, insisted that we
+proceed. So we marched and passed many more hills.
+
+In the meantime it began to rain, after the whole-hearted tropical
+fashion. In two minutes we were drenched to the skin. I kept my matches
+and notebook dry by placing them in the crown of my cork helmet. After
+the intense heat this tepid downpour seemed to us delicious.
+
+And then, quite unexpectedly, of course, we came around a bend to make
+out through the sheets of rain the steel girders of the famous Tsavo
+bridge.[15]
+
+We clambered up a steep, slippery bank to the right-of-way, along which
+we proceeded half a mile to the station. This consisted of two or three
+native huts, a house for the East Indian in charge, and the station
+building itself. The latter was a small frame structure with a narrow
+floorless veranda. There was no platform. Drawing close on all sides was
+the interminable thorn scrub. Later, when the veil of rain had been
+drawn aside, we found that Tsavo, perched on a hillside, looked abroad
+over a wide prospect. For the moment all we saw was a dark, dismal,
+dripping station, wherein was no sign of life.
+
+We were beginning to get chilly, and we wanted very much some tea, fire,
+a chance to dry, pending the arrival of our safari. We jerked open the
+door and peered into the inky interior.
+
+"Babu!" yelled F., "Babu!"
+
+From an inner back room came the faint answer in most precise English,--
+
+"I can-not come; I am pray-ing."
+
+There followed the sharp, quick tinkle of a little bell--the Indian
+manner of calling upon the Lord's attention.
+
+We both knew better than to hustle the institutions of the East; so we
+waited with what patience we had, listening to the intermittent
+tinkling of the little bell. At the end of fully fifteen minutes the
+devotee appeared. He proved to be a mild, deprecating little man, very
+eager to help, but without resources. He was a Hindu, and lived mainly
+on tea and rice. The rice was all out, but he expected more on the night
+train. There was no trading store here. He was the only inhabitant.
+After a few more answers he disappeared, to return carrying two pieces
+of letter paper on which were tea and a little coarse native sugar.
+These, with a half-dozen very small potatoes, were all he had to offer.
+
+It did not look very encouraging. We had absolutely nothing in which to
+boil water. Of course we could not borrow of our host; caste stood in
+the way there. If we were even to touch one of his utensils, that
+utensil was for him defiled for ever. Nevertheless, as we had eaten
+nothing since four o'clock that morning, and had put a hard day's work
+behind us, we made an effort. After a short search we captured a savage
+possessed of a surfuria, or native cooking pot. Memba Sasa scrubbed this
+with sand. First we made tea in it, and drank turn about, from its wide
+edge. This warmed us up somewhat. Then we dumped in our few potatoes and
+a single guinea fowl that F. had decapitated earlier in the day. We
+ate; and passed the pot over to Memba Sasa.
+
+So far, so good; but we were still very wet, and the uncomfortable
+thought would obtrude itself that the safari might not get in that day.
+It behoved us at least to dry what we had on. I hunted up Memba Sasa,
+whom I found in a native hut. A fire blazed in the middle of the floor.
+I stooped low to enter, and squatted on my heels with the natives.
+Slowly I steamed off the surface moisture. We had rather a good time
+chatting and laughing. After a while I looked out. It had stopped
+raining. Therefore I emerged and set some of the men collecting
+firewood. Shortly I had a fine little blaze going under the veranda roof
+of the station. F. and I hung out our breeches to dry, and spread the
+tails of our shirts over the heat. F. was actually the human chimney,
+for the smoke was pouring in clouds from the breast and collar of his
+shirt. We were fine figures for the public platform of a railway
+station!
+
+We had just about dried off and had reassumed our thin and scanty
+garments, when the babu emerged. We stared in drop-jawed astonishment.
+He had muffled his head and mouth in a most brilliant scarf, as if for
+zero weather; although dressed otherwise in the usual pongee. Under one
+arm he carried a folded clumsy cotton umbrella; around his waist he had
+belted a huge knife; in his other hand he carried his battle-axe. I mean
+just that--his battle-axe. We had seen such things on tapestries or in
+museums, but did not dream that they still existed out of captivity.
+This was an Oriental looking battle-axe with a handle three feet long, a
+spike on top, a spike out behind, and a half-moon blade in front. The
+babu had with a little of his signal paint done the whole thing, blade
+and all, to a brilliant window-shutter green.
+
+As soon as we had recovered our breath, we asked him very politely the
+reason for these stupendous preparations. It seemed that it was his
+habit to take a daily stroll just before sunset, "for the sake of the
+health," as he told us in his accurate English.
+
+"The bush is full of bad men," he explained, "who would like to kill me;
+but when they see this axe and this knife they say to each other, 'There
+walks a very bad man. We dare not kill him.'"
+
+He marched very solemnly a quarter-mile up the track and back, always in
+plain view. Promptly on his return he dived into his little back room
+where the periodic tinkling of his praying bell for some time marked his
+gratitude for having escaped the "bad men."
+
+The bell ceased. Several times he came to the door, eyed us timidly, and
+bolted back into the darkness. Finally he approached to within ten feet,
+twisted his hands and giggled in a most deprecating fashion.
+
+"What is the use of this killing game?" he gabbled as rapidly as he
+could. "Man should not destroy what man cannot first create." After
+which he giggled again and fled.
+
+His conscience, evidently, had driven him to this defiance of our high
+mightinesses against his sense of politeness and his fears.
+
+About this time my boy Mohammed and the cook drifted in. They reported
+that they had left the safari not far back. Our hopes of supper and
+blankets rose. They declined, however, with the gathering darkness, and
+were replaced by wrath against the faithless ones. Memba Sasa, in spite
+of his long day, took a gun and disappeared in the darkness. He did not
+get back until nine o'clock, when he suddenly appeared in the doorway to
+lean the gun in the corner, and to announce, "Hapana safari."
+
+We stretched ourselves on a bench and a table--the floor was
+impossible--and took what sleep we could. In the small hours the train
+thundered through, the train we had hoped to catch!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[15] This is the point at which construction was stopped by man-eating
+lions. See Patterson's "The Man-eaters of Tsavo."
+
+
+
+
+XXXII.
+
+THE BABU.
+
+
+We stretched ourselves stiffly in the first gray of dawn, wondering
+where we could get a mouthful of breakfast. On emerging from the station
+a strange and gladsome sight met our eyes--namely, chop boxes and gun
+cases belonging to some sportsman not yet arrived. Necessity knows no
+law; so we promptly helped ourselves to food and gun-cleaning
+implements. Much refreshed, we lit our pipes and settled ourselves to
+wait for our delinquents.
+
+Shortly after sunrise an Indian track inspector trundled in on a handcar
+propelled by two natives. He was a suave and corpulent person with a
+very large umbrella and beautiful silken garments. The natives upset the
+handcar off the track, and the newcomer settled himself for an enjoyable
+morning. He and the babu discussed ethics and metaphysical philosophy
+for three solid hours. Evidently they came from different parts of
+India, and their only common language was English. Through the thin
+partition in the station building we could hear plainly every word. It
+was very interesting. Especially did we chortle with delight when the
+inspector began one of his arguments somewhat as follows:--
+
+"Now the two English who are here. They possess great sums of
+wealth"--F. nudged me delightedly--"and they have weapons to kill, and
+much with which to do things, yet their savage minds--"
+
+It was plain, rank, eavesdropping, but most illuminating, thus to get at
+first hand the Eastern point of view as to ourselves; to hear the
+bloodless, gentle shell of Indian philosophy described by believers.
+They discussed the most minute and impractical points, and involved
+themselves in the most uncompromising dilemmas.
+
+Thus the gist of one argument was as follows: "All sexual intercourse is
+sin, but the race must go forward by means of sexual intercourse;
+therefore the race is conceived in sin and is sinful; but it is a great
+sin for me, as an individual, not to carry forward the race, since the
+Divine Will decrees that in some way the race is necessary to it.
+_Therefore_ it would seem that man is in sin whichever way you look at
+it--"
+
+"But," interposes the inspector firmly but politely, "is it not possible
+that sexual sin and the sin of opposing Divine Will may be of balance in
+the spirit, so that in resisting one sort a man acquires virtue to
+commit the other without harm--" And so on for hours.
+
+At twelve-thirty the safari drifted in. Consider that fact and what it
+meant. The plain duty of the headman was, of course, to have seen that
+the men followed us in the day before. But allowing, for the sake of
+argument, that this was impossible, and that the men had been forced by
+the exhaustion of some of their number to stop and camp, if they had
+arisen betimes they should have completed the journey in two hours at
+most. That should have brought them in by half-past seven or eight
+o'clock. But a noon arrival condemned them without the necessity of
+argument. They had camped early, had risen very, very late, and had
+dawdled on the road.
+
+We ourselves gave the two responsible headmen twenty lashes apiece; then
+turned over to them the job of thrashing the rest. Ten per man was the
+allotment. They expected the punishment; took it gracefully. Some even
+thanked us when it was over! The babu disappeared in his station.
+
+About an hour later he approached us, very deprecating, and handed us a
+telegram. It was from the district commissioner at Voi ordering us to
+report for flogging "porters on the Tsavo Station platform."
+
+"I am truly sorry, I am truly sorry," the babu was murmuring at our
+elbows.
+
+"What does this mean?" we demanded of him.
+
+He produced a thick book.
+
+"It is in here--the law," he explained. "You must not flog men on the
+station platform. It was my duty to report."
+
+"How did we know that? Why didn't you tell us?"
+
+"If you had gone there"--he pointed ten feet away to a spot exactly like
+all other spots--"it would have been off the platform. Then I had
+nothing to say."
+
+We tried to become angry.
+
+"But why in blazes couldn't you have told us of that quietly and
+decently? We'd have moved."
+
+"It is the law" He tapped his thick book.
+
+"But we cannot be supposed to know by heart every law in that book. Why
+didn't you warn us before reporting?" we insisted.
+
+"I am truly sorry," he repeated. "I hope and trust it will not prove
+serious. But it is in the book."
+
+We continued in the same purposeless fashion for a moment or so longer.
+Then the babu ended the discussion thus,--
+
+"It was my duty. I am truly sorry. Suppose I had not reported and should
+die to-day, and should go to heaven, and God should ask me, 'Have you
+done your duty to-day?' what should I say to Him?"
+
+We gave it up; we were up against Revealed Religion.
+
+So that night we took a freight train southward to Voi, leaving the babu
+and his prayer-bell, and his green battle-axe and his conscience alone
+in the wilderness. We had quite a respect for that babu.
+
+The district commissioner listened appreciatively to our tale.
+
+"Of course I shall not carry the matter further," he told us, "but
+having known the babu, you must see that once he had reported to me I
+was compelled to order you down here. I am sorry for the inconvenience."
+
+And when we reflected on the cataclysmic upheaval that babu would have
+undergone had we not been summoned after breaking one of The Laws in the
+Book, we had to admit the district commissioner was right.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PART VI.
+
+IN MASAILAND.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII.
+
+OVER THE LIKIPIA ESCARPMENT.
+
+
+Owing to an outbreak of bubonic plague, and consequent quarantine, we
+had recruited our men outside Nairobi, and had sent them, in charge of
+C., to a little station up the line.
+
+Billy and I saw to the loading of our equipment on the train, and at two
+o'clock, in solitary state, set forth. Our only attendants were Mohammed
+and Memba Sasa, who had been fumigated and inoculated and generally
+Red-Crossed for the purpose.
+
+The little narrow-gauge train doubled and twisted in its climb up the
+range overlooking Nairobi and the Athi Plains. Fields of corn grew so
+tall as partially to conceal villages of round, grass-thatched huts with
+conical roofs; we looked down into deep ravines where grew the
+broad-leaved bananas; the steep hillsides had all been carefully
+cultivated. Savages leaning on spears watched us puff heavily by.
+Women, richly ornamented with copper wire or beads, toiled along bent
+under loads carried by means of a band across the top of the head.[16]
+Naked children rushed out to wave at us. We were steaming quite
+comfortably through Africa as it had been for thousands of years before
+the white man came.
+
+At Kikuyu Station we came to a halt. Kikuyu Station ordinarily embarks
+about two passengers a month, I suppose. Now it was utterly swamped with
+business, for on it had descended all our safari of thirty-nine men and
+three mules. Thirty of the thirty-nine yelled and shrieked and got in
+the wrong place, as usual. C. and the train men and the stationmaster
+and our responsible boys heaved and tugged and directed, ordered,
+commanded. At length the human element was loaded to its places and
+locked in. Then the mules had to be urged up a very narrow gang-lank
+into a dangerous-looking car. Quite sensibly they declined to take
+chances. We persuaded them. The process was quite simple. Two of the men
+holding the ends at a safe distance stretched a light strong cord across
+the beasts' hind legs, and sawed it back and forth.
+
+We clanged the doors shut, climbed aboard, and the train at last
+steamed on. Now bits of forest came across our way, deep, shaded, with
+trailing curtain vines, and wide leaves as big as table tops, and high,
+lush, impenetrable undergrowth full of flashing birds, fathomless
+shadows, and inquisitive monkeys. Occasionally we emerged to the edge of
+a long oval meadow, set in depressions among hills, like our Sierra
+meadows. Indeed so like were these openings to those in our own wooded
+mountains that we always experienced a distinct shock of surprise as the
+familiar woods parted to disclose a dark solemn savage with flashing
+spear.
+
+We stopped at various stations, and descended and walked about in the
+gathering shadows of the forest. It was getting cool. Many little things
+attracted our attention, to remain in our memories as isolated pictures.
+Thus I remember one grave savage squatted by the track playing on a sort
+of mandoline-shaped instrument. It had two strings, and he twanged these
+alternately, without the slightest effort to change their pitch by
+stopping with his fingers. He bent his head sidewise, and listened with
+the meticulous attention of a connoisseur. We stopped at that place for
+fully ten minutes, but not for a second did he leave off twanging his
+two strings, nor did he even momentarily relax his attention.
+
+It was now near sundown. We had been climbing steadily. The train
+shrieked twice, and unexpectedly slid out to the edge of the Likipia
+Escarpment. We looked down once more into the great Rift Valley.
+
+The Rift Valley is as though a strip of Africa--extending half the
+length of the continent--had in time past sunk bodily some thousands of
+feet, leaving a more or less sheer escarpment on either side, and
+preserving intact its own variegated landscape in the bottom. We were on
+the Likipia Escarpment. We looked across to the Mau Escarpment, where
+the country over which our train had been travelling continued after its
+interruption by the valley. And below us were mountains, streams,
+plains. The westering sun threw strong slants of light down and across.
+
+The engine shut off its power, and we slid silently down the rather
+complicated grades and curves of the descent. A noble forest threw its
+shadows over us. Through the chance openings we caught glimpses of the
+pale country far below. Across high trestle bridges we rattled, and
+craned over to see the rushing white water of the mountain torrents a
+hundred feet down. The shriek of our engine echoed and re-echoed
+weirdly from the serried trunks of trees and from the great cliffs that
+seemed to lift themselves as we descended.
+
+We debarked at Kijabe[17] well after dark. It is situated on a ledge in
+the escarpment, is perhaps a quarter-mile wide, and includes nothing
+more elaborate than the station, a row of Indian dukkas, and two houses
+of South Africans set back towards the rise in the cliffs. A mile or so
+away, and on a little higher level, stand the extensive buildings of an
+American mission. It is, I believe, educational as well as sectarian, is
+situated in one of the most healthful climates of East Africa, and is
+prosperous.
+
+At the moment we saw none of these things. We were too busy getting men,
+mules, and equipment out of the train. Our lanterns flared in the great
+wind that swept down the defile; and across the track little fires
+flared too. Shortly we made the acquaintance of the South Africander who
+furnished us our ox teams and wagon; and of a lank, drawling youth who
+was to be our "rider." The latter was very anxious to get started, so we
+piled all our stores and equipment but those immediately necessary for
+the night aboard the great wagon. Then we returned to the dak-bungalow
+for a very belated supper. While eating this we discussed our plans.
+
+These were in essence very simple. Somewhere south of the Great Thirst
+of the Sotik a river called the Narossara. Back of the river were high
+mountains, and down the river were benches dropping off by thousands of
+feet to the barren country of Lake Magahdi. Over some of this country
+ranged the Greater Kudu, easily the prize buck of East Africa. We
+intended to try for a Greater Kudu.
+
+People laughed at us. The beast is extremely rare; it ranges over a wide
+area; it inhabits the thickest sort of cover in a sheer mountainous
+country; its senses are wonderfully acute; and it is very wary. A man
+_might_, once in a blue moon, get one by happening upon it accidentally,
+but deliberately to go after it was sheer lunacy. So we were told. As a
+matter of fact, we thought so ourselves, but Greater Kudu was as good an
+excuse as another.
+
+The most immediate of our physical difficulties was the Thirst. Six
+miles from Kijabe we would leave the Kedong River. After that was no
+more water for two days and nights. During that time we should be forced
+to travel and rest in alternation day and night, with a great deal of
+travel and very little rest. We should be able to carry for the men a
+limited amount of water on the ox wagon, but the cattle could not drink.
+It was a hard, anxious grind. A day's journey beyond the first water
+after the Thirst we should cross the Southern Guaso Nyero River.[18]
+Then two days should land us at the Narossara. There we must leave our
+ox wagon and push on with our tiny safari. We planned to relay back for
+porters from our different camps.
+
+That was our whole plan. Our transport rider's object in starting this
+night was to reach the Kedong River, and there to outspan until our
+arrival next day. The cattle would thus get a good feed and rest. Then
+at four in the afternoon we would set out to conquer the Thirst. After
+that it would be a question of travelling to suit the oxen.
+
+Next morning, when we arose, we found one of the wagon Kikuyus awaiting
+us. His tale ran that after going four miles, the oxen had been
+stampeded by lions. In the mix-up the dusselboom had been broken. He
+demanded a new dusselboom. I looked as wise as though I knew just what
+that meant; and told him largely, to help himself. Shortly he departed
+carrying what looked to be the greater part of a forest tree.
+
+We were in no hurry, so we did not try to get our safari under way
+before eight o'clock. It consisted of twenty-nine porters, the
+gunbearers, three personal boys, three syces, and the cook. Of this lot
+some few stand out from the rest, and deserve particular attention.
+
+Of course I had my veterans, Memba Sasa and Mohammed. There was also
+Kongoni, gunbearer, elsewhere described. The third gunbearer was
+Marrouki, a Wakamba. He was the personal gunbearer of a Mr. Twigg, who
+very courteously loaned him for this trip as possessing some knowledge
+of the country. He was a small person, with stripes about his eyes;
+dressed in a Scotch highland cap, khaki breeches, and a shooting coat
+miles too big for him. His soul was earnest, his courage great, his
+training good, his intelligence none too brilliant. Timothy, our cook,
+was pure Swahili. He was a thin, elderly individual, with a wrinkled
+brow of care. This represented a conscientious soul. He tried hard to
+please, but he never could quite forget that he had cooked for the
+Governor's safari. His air was always one of silent disapproval of our
+modest outfit. So well did he do, however, often under trying
+circumstances, that at the close of the expedition Billy presented him
+with a very fancy knife. To her vast astonishment he burst into violent
+sobs.
+
+"Why, what is it?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, memsahib," he wailed, "I wanted a watch!"
+
+As personal boy Billy had a Masai named Geyeye.[19] The members of this
+proud and aristocratic tribe rarely condescend to work for the white
+man; but when they do, they are very fine servants, for they are highly
+intelligent. Geyeye was short and very, very ugly. Perhaps this may
+partly explain his leaving tribal life, for the Masai generally are over
+six feet.
+
+C.'s man was an educated Coast Swahili named Abba Ali. This individual
+was very smart. He wore a neatly-trimmed Vandyke beard, a flannel
+boating hat, smart tailored khakis, and carried a rattan cane. He was
+alert, quick, and intelligent. His position was midway between that of
+personal boy and headman.
+
+Of the rank and file we began with twenty-nine. Two changed their minds
+before we were fairly started, and departed in the night. There was no
+time to get regular porters; but fortunately a Kikuyu chief detailed two
+wild savages from his tribe to act as carriers. These two children of
+nature drifted in with pleasant smiles and little else save
+knick-knacks. From our supplies we gave them two thin jerseys, reaching
+nearly to the knees. Next day they appeared with broad tucks sewed
+around the middle! They looked like "My Mama didn't use wool soap." We
+then gave it up, and left them free and untrammelled.
+
+They differed radically. One was past the first enthusiasms and vanities
+of youth. He was small, unobtrusive, unornamented. He had no possessions
+save the jersey, the water-bottle, and the blanket we ourselves
+supplied. The blanket he crossed bandolier fashion on one shoulder. It
+hung down behind like a tasselled sash. His face was little and wizened
+and old. He was quiet and uncomplaining, and the "easy mark" for all the
+rest. We had constantly to be interfering to save him from imposition as
+to too heavy loads, too many jobs, and the like. Nearing the close of
+the long expedition, when our loads were lighter and fewer, one day C.
+spoke up.
+
+"I'm going to give the old man a good time," said he. "I doubt if he's
+ever had one before, or if he ever will again. He's that sort of a meek
+damnfool."
+
+So it was decreed that Kimau[20] should carry nothing for the rest of
+the trip, was to do no more work, was to have all he wanted to eat. It
+was a treat to see him. He accepted these things without surprise,
+without spoken thanks; just as he would have accepted an increased
+supply of work and kicks. Before his little fire he squatted all day,
+gazing vacantly off into space, or gnawing on a piece of the meat he
+always kept roasting on sticks. He spoke to no one; he never smiled or
+displayed any obvious signs of enjoyment; but from him radiated a
+feeling of deep content.
+
+His companion savage was a young blood, and still affected by the
+vanities of life. His hair he wore in short tight curls, resembling the
+rope hair of a French poodle, liberally anointed with castor-oil and
+coloured with red-paint clay. His body, too, was turned to bronze by the
+same method, so that he looked like a beautiful smooth metal statue come
+to life. To set this quality off he wore glittering collars, bracelets,
+and ear ornaments of polished copper and brass. When he joined us his
+sole costume was a negligent two-foot strip of cotton cloth. After he
+had received his official jersey, he carefully tied the cloth over his
+wonderful head; nor as far as we knew did he again remove it until the
+end of the expedition. All his movements were inexpressibly graceful.
+They reminded one somehow of Flaxman's drawings of the Greek gods. His
+face, too, was good-natured and likeable. A certain half feminine, wild
+grace, combined with the queer effect of his headgear, caused us to name
+him Daphne. At home he was called Kingangui. At first he carried his
+burden after the fashion of savages--on the back; and kept to the rear
+of the procession; and at evening consorted only with old Lightfoot. As
+soon as opportunity offered, he built himself a marvellous iridescent
+ball of marabout feathers. Each of these he split along the quill, so
+that they curled and writhed in the wind. This picturesque charm he
+suspended from a short pole in front of his tent. Also, he belonged to
+the Kikuyu tribe; he ate no game meat, but confined his diet to cornmeal
+porridge. We were much interested in watching Daphne's gradual
+conversion from savage ways to those of the regular porter. Within two
+weeks he was carrying his load on his head or shoulder, and trying to
+keep up near the head of the safari. The charm of feathers disappeared
+shortly after, I am sorry to say. He took his share of the meat. Within
+two months Daphne was imitating as closely as possible the manners and
+customs of his safari mates. But he never really succeeded in looking
+anything but the wild and graceful savage he was.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[16] After the fashion of the Canadian tump line.
+
+[17] Pronounce all the syllables.
+
+[18] An entirely different stream from that flowing north of Mt. Kenia.
+
+[19] Pronounce _every_ syllable.
+
+[20] His official name was Lightfoot, Queen of the Fairies, because of
+his ballet-like costume.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV.
+
+TO THE KEDONG.
+
+
+For four hours we descended the valley through high thorn scrub or the
+occasional grassy openings. We were now in the floor of the Rift Valley,
+and both along the escarpments and in the floor of the great blue valley
+itself mountains were all about us. Most of the large ones were
+evidently craters; and everywhere were smaller kopjes or buttes, that in
+their day had also served as blow holes for subterranean fires.
+
+At the end of this time we arrived at the place where we were supposed
+to find the wagon. No wagon was there.
+
+The spot was in the middle of a level plain on which grew very scattered
+bushes, a great deal like the sparser mesquite growths of Arizona.
+Towards the Likipia Escarpment, and about half-way to its base, a line
+of trees marked the course of the Kedong River. Beyond that, fairly
+against the mountain, we made out a settler's house.
+
+Leaving Billy and the safari, C. and I set out for this house. The
+distance was long, and we had not made half of it before thunder clouds
+began to gather. They came up thick and black behind the escarpment, and
+rapidly spread over the entire heavens. We found the wagon shortly,
+still mending its dusselboom, or whatever the thing was. Leaving
+instructions for it to proceed to a certain point on the Kedong River,
+we started back for our safari.
+
+It rained. In ten minutes the dusty plains, as far as the eye could
+reach, were covered with water two or three inches deep, from which the
+sparse bunches of grasses grew like reeds in a great marshy lake. We
+splashed along with the water over our ankles. The channels made by the
+game trails offered natural conduits, and wherever there was the least
+grade they had become rushing brooks. We found the safari very
+bedraggled. Billy had made a mound of valuables, atop which she perched,
+her waterproof cape spread as wide as possible, a good deal like a
+brooding hen. We set out for the meeting-point on the Kedong. In half an
+hour we had there found a bit of higher ground and had made camp.
+
+As suddenly as they had gathered the storm clouds broke away. The
+expiring sun sent across the valley a flood of golden light, that gilded
+the rugged old mountain of Suswa over the way.
+
+"Directly on the other side of Suswa," C. told me, "there is a 'pan' of
+hard clay. This rain will fill it, and we shall find water there. We can
+take a night's rest, and set off comfortably in the morning."
+
+So the rain that had soaked us so thoroughly was a blessing after all.
+While we were cooking supper the wagon passed us, its wheels and frame
+creaking, its great whip cracking like a rifle, its men shrieking at the
+imperturbable team of eighteen oxen. It would travel until the oxen
+wanted to graze, or sleep, or scratch an ear, or meditate on why is a
+Kikuyu. Thereupon they would be outspanned and allowed to do it,
+whatever it was, until they were ready to go on again. Then they would
+go on. These sequences might take place at any time of the day or night,
+and for greater or lesser intervals of time. That was distinctly up to
+the oxen; the human beings had mighty little to say in the matter. But
+transport riding, from the point of view of the rank outsider, really
+deserves a chapter of its own.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV.
+
+THE TRANSPORT RIDER.
+
+
+The wagon is one evolved in South Africa--a long, heavily-constructed
+affair, with ingenious braces and timbers so arranged as to furnish the
+maximum clearance with the greatest facility for substitution in case
+the necessity for repairs might arise. The whole vehicle can be
+dismounted and reassembled in a few hours; so that unfordable streams or
+impossible bits of country can be crossed piecemeal. Its enormous wheels
+are set wide apart. The brake is worked by a crank at the rear, like a
+reversal of the starting mechanism of a motor car. Bolted to the frame
+on either side between the front and rear wheels are capacious
+cupboards, and two stout water kegs swing to and fro when the craft is
+under way. The net carrying capacity of such a wagon is from three to
+four thousand pounds.
+
+This formidable vehicle, in our own case, was drawn by a team of
+eighteen oxen. The biggest brutes, the wheelers, were attached to a
+tongue, all the others pulled on a long chain. The only harness was the
+pronged yoke that fitted just forward of the hump. Over rough country
+the wheelers were banged and jerked about savagely by the tongue; they
+did not seem to mind it but exhibited a certain amount of intelligence
+in manipulation.
+
+To drive these oxen we had one white man named Brown, and two small
+Kikuyu savages. One of these worked the brake crank in the rear while
+the other preceded the lead cattle. Brown exercised general supervision,
+a long-lashed whip and Boer-Dutch expletives and admonitions.
+
+In transport riding, as this game is called, there is required a great
+amount of especial skill though not necessarily a high degree of
+intelligence. Along the flats all goes well enough, but once in the
+unbelievable rough country of a hill trek the situation alters. A man
+must know cattle and their symptoms. It is no light feat to wake up
+eighteen sluggish bovine minds to the necessity for effort, and then to
+throw so much dynamic energy into the situation that the whole eighteen
+will begin to pull at once. That is the secret, unanimity; an ox is the
+most easily discouraged working animal on earth. If the first three
+couples begin to haul before the others have aroused to their effort,
+they will not succeed in budging the wagon an inch, but after a moment's
+struggle will give up completely. By that time the leaders respond to
+the command and throw themselves forward in the yoke. In vain. They
+cannot pull the wagon and their wheel comrades too. Therefore they give
+up. By this time, perhaps, the lash has aroused the first lot to another
+effort. And so they go, pulling and hauling against each other, getting
+nowhere, until the end is an exhausted team, a driver half insane, and a
+great necessity for unloading.
+
+A good driver, on the other hand, shrieks a few premonitory Dutch
+words--and then! I suppose inside those bovine heads the effect is
+somewhat that of a violent electric explosion. At any rate it hits them
+all at once, and all together, in response, they surge against their
+yokes. The heavily laden wagon creaks, groans, moves forward. The
+hurricane of Dutch and the volleys of whip crackings rise to a
+crescendo. We are off!
+
+To perform just this little simple trick of getting the thing started
+requires not only a peculiar skill or gift, but also lungs of brass and
+a throat of iron. A transport rider without a voice is as a tenor in the
+same fix. He may--and does--get so hoarse that it is a pain to hear him;
+but as long as he can croak in good volume he is all right. Mere
+shouting will not do. He must shriek, until to the sympathetic bystander
+it seems that his throat must split wide open. Furthermore, he must
+shriek the proper things. It all sounds alike to every one but transport
+riders and oxen; but as a matter of fact it is Boer-Dutch, nicely
+assorted to suit different occasions. It is incredible that oxen should
+distinguish; but, then, it is also incredible that trout should
+distinguish the nice differences in artificial flies.
+
+After the start has been made successfully, the craft must be kept under
+way. To an unbiassed bystander the whole affair looks insane. The wagon
+creaks and sways and groans and cries aloud as it bumps over great
+boulders in the way; the leading Kikuyu dances nimbly and shrills
+remarks at the nearest cattle; the tail Kikuyu winds energetically back
+and forth on his little handle, and tries to keep his feet. And Brown!
+he is magnificent! His long lash sends out a volley of rifle reports,
+down, up, ahead, back; his cracked voice roars out an unending stream
+of apparent gibberish. Back and forth along the line of the team he
+skips nimbly, the sweat streaming from his face. And the oxen plod
+along, unhasting, unexcited, their eyes dreamy, chewing the cud of
+yesterday's philosophic reflections. The situation conveys the general
+impression of a peevish little stream breaking against great calm
+cliffs. All this frantic excitement and expenditure of energy is so
+apparently purposeless and futile, the calm cattle seem so aloof and
+superior to it all, so absolutely unaffected by it. They are going
+slowly, to be sure; their gait may be maddeningly deliberate, but
+evidently they do not intend to be hurried. Why not let them take their
+own speed?
+
+But all this hullabaloo means something after all. It does its business,
+and the top of the boulder-strewn hill is gained. Without it the whole
+concern would have stopped, and then the wagon would have to be unloaded
+before a fresh start could have been made. Results with cattle are not
+shown by facial expression nor by increased speed, but simply by
+continuance. They will plod up steep hills or along the level at the
+same placid gait. Only in the former case they require especial
+treatment.
+
+In case the wagon gets stuck on a hill, as will occasionally happen, so
+that all the oxen are discouraged at once, we would see one of the
+Kikuyus leading the team back and forth, back and forth, on the side
+hill just ahead of the wagon. This is to confuse their minds, cause them
+to forget their failure, and thus to make another attempt.
+
+At one stretch we had three days of real mountains. N'gombe[21] Brown
+shrieked like a steam calliope all the way through. He lasted the
+distance, but had little camp-fire conversation even with his beloved
+Kikuyus.
+
+When the team is outspanned, which in the waterless country of forced
+marches is likely to be almost any time of the day or night, N'gombe
+Brown sought a little rest. For this purpose he had a sort of bunk that
+let down underneath the wagon. If it were daytime, the cattle were
+allowed to graze under supervision of one of the Kikuyus. If it was
+night time they were tethered to the long chain, where they lay in a
+somnolent double row. A lantern at the head of the file and one at the
+wagon's tail were supposed to discourage lions. In a bad lion country
+fires were added to these defences.
+
+N'gombe Brown thus worked hard through varied and long hours in strict
+intimacy with stupid and exasperating beasts. After working hours he
+liked to wander out to watch those same beasts grazing! His mind was as
+full of cattle as that! Although we offered him reading matter, he never
+seemed to care for it, nor for long-continued conversation with white
+people not of his trade. In fact the only gleam of interest I could get
+out of him was by commenting on the qualities or peculiarities of the
+oxen. He had a small mouth-organ on which he occasionally performed, and
+would hold forth for hours with his childlike Kikuyus. In the
+intelligence to follow ordinary directions he was an infant. We had to
+iterate and reiterate in words of one syllable our directions as to
+routes and meeting-points, and then he was quite as apt to go wrong as
+right. Yet, I must repeat, he knew thoroughly all the ins and outs of a
+very difficult trade, and understood, as well, how to keep his cattle
+always fit and in good condition. In fact he was a little hipped on what
+the "dear n'gombes" should or should not be called upon to do.
+
+One incident will illustrate all this better than I could explain it.
+When we reached the Narossara River we left the wagon and pushed on
+afoot. We were to be gone an indefinite time, and we left N'gombe Brown
+and his outfit very well fixed. Along the Narossara ran a pleasant shady
+strip of high jungle; the country about was clear and open; but most
+important of all, a white man of education and personal charm occupied a
+trading boma, or enclosure, near at hand. An accident changed our plans
+and brought us back unexpectedly at the end of a few weeks. We found
+that N'gombe Brown had trekked back a long day's journey, and was
+encamped alone at the end of a spur of mountains. We sent native runners
+after him. He explained his change of base by saying that the cattle
+feed was a little better at his new camp! Mind you this: at the
+Narossara the feed was quite good enough, the oxen were doing no work,
+there was companionship, books, papers, and even a phonograph to while
+away the long weeks until our return. N'gombe Brown quite cheerfully
+deserted all this to live in solitude where he imagined the feed to be
+microscopically better!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[21] N'gombe = oxen.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI.
+
+ACROSS THE THIRST.
+
+
+We were off, a bright, clear day after the rains. Suswa hung grayish
+pink against the bluest of skies. Our way slanted across the Rift Valley
+to her base, turned the corner, and continued on the other side of the
+great peak until we had reached the rainwater "pan" on her farther side.
+It was a long march.
+
+The plains were very wide and roomy. Here and there on them rose many
+small cones and craters, lava flows and other varied evidences of recent
+volcanic activity. Geologically recent, I mean. The grasses of the
+flowing plains were very brown, and the molehill craters very dark; the
+larger craters blasted and austere; the higher escarpment in the
+background blue with a solemn distance. The sizes of things were not
+originally fitted out for little tiny people like human beings. We
+walked hours to reach landmarks apparently only a few miles away.
+
+In this manner we crept along industriously until noon, by which time we
+had nearly reached the shoulder of Suswa, around which we had to double.
+The sun was strong, and the men not yet hardened to the work. We had
+many stragglers. After lunch Memba Sasa and I strolled along on a route
+flanking that of the safari, looking for the first of our meat supply.
+Within a short time I had killed a Thompson's gazelle. Some solemn
+giraffes looked on at the performance, and then moved off like
+mechanical toys.
+
+The day lengthened. We were in the midst of wonderful scenery. Our
+objection grew to be that it took so long to put any of it behind us.
+Insensibly, however, we made progress. Suddenly, as it seemed, we found
+ourselves looking at the other side of Suswa, and various brand-new
+little craters had moved up to take the places of our old friends. At
+last, about half-past four, we topped the swell of one of the numerous
+and interminable land billows that undulate across all plains countries
+here, and saw a few miles away the wagon outspanned. We reached it about
+sunset, to be greeted by the welcome news that there was indeed water in
+the pan.
+
+We unsaddled just before dark, and I immediately started towards the
+game herds, many of which were grazing a half-mile away. The gazelle
+would supply our own larder, but meat for hard-worked man was very
+desirable. I shot a hartebeeste, made the prearranged signal for men to
+carry meat, and returned to camp.
+
+Even yet the men were not all in. We took lanterns and returned along
+the road, for the long marches under a desert sun are no joke. At last
+we had accounted for all but two. These we had to abandon. Next day we
+found their loads, but never laid eyes on them again. Thus early our
+twenty-nine became twenty-seven.
+
+About nine o'clock, just as we were turning, a number of lions began to
+roar. Usually a lion roars once or twice by way of satisfaction after
+leaving a kill. These, however, were engaged in driving game, and hence
+trying to make as much noise as possible. We distinguished plainly seven
+individuals, perhaps more. The air trembled with the sound as to the
+deepest tones of a big organ, only the organ is near and enclosed, while
+these vibrations were in the open air and remote. For a few moments the
+great salvos would boom across the veld, roll after roll of thunder;
+then would ensue a momentary dead silence; then a single voice would
+open, to be joined immediately by the others.
+
+We awoke next day to an unexpected cold drizzle. This was a bit
+uncomfortable, from one point of view, and most unusual, but it robbed
+the thirst of its terrors. We were enabled to proceed leisurely, and to
+get a good sleep near water every night. The wagon had, as usual, pulled
+out some time during the night.
+
+Our way led over a succession of low rolling ridges each higher than its
+predecessor. Game herds fed in the shallow valleys between. At about ten
+o'clock we came to the foot of the Mau Escarpment, and also to the
+unexpected sight of the wagon outspanned. N'gombe Brown explained to us
+that the oxen had refused to proceed farther in face of a number of
+lions that came around to sniff at them. Then the rain had come on, and
+he had been unwilling to attempt the Mau while the footing was slippery.
+This sounded reasonable; in fact, it was still reasonable. The grass was
+here fairly neck high, and we found a rain-filled water-hole. Therefore
+we decided to make camp. C. and I wandered out in search of game. We
+tramped a great deal of bold, rugged country, both in canon bottoms and
+along the open ridges, but found only a rhinoceros, one bush-buck and a
+dozen hartebeeste. African game, as a general rule, avoids a country
+where the grass grows very high. We enjoyed, however, some bold and
+wonderful mountain scenery, and obtained glimpses through the flying
+murk of the vast plains and the base of Suswa. On a precipitous canon
+cliff we found a hanging garden of cactus and of looped cactus-like
+vines that was a marvel to behold. We ran across the hartebeeste on our
+way home. Our men were already out of meat; the hartebeeste of yesterday
+had disappeared. These porters are a good deal like the old-fashioned
+Michigan lumberjacks--they take a good deal of feeding for the first few
+days. When we came upon the little herd in the neck-high grass, I took a
+shot. At the report the animal went down flat. We wandered over slowly.
+Memba Sasa whetted his knife and walked up. Thereupon Mr. Hartebeeste
+jumped to his feet, flirted his tail gaily, and departed. We followed
+him a mile or so, but he got stronger and gayer every moment, until at
+last he frisked out of the landscape quite strong and hearty. In all my
+African experience I lost only six animals hit by bullets, as I took
+infinite pains and any amount of time to hunt down wounded beasts. This
+animal was, I think, "creased" by too high a shot. Certainly he was not
+much injured; but certainly he got a big shock to start with.
+
+The little herd had gone on. I got down and crawled on hands and knees
+in the thick grass. It was slow work, and I had to travel by landmarks.
+When I finally reckoned I had about reached the proper place, I stood up
+suddenly, my rifle at ready. So dense was the cover and so still the air
+that I had actually crawled right into the middle of the band! While we
+were cutting up the meat the sun broke through strongly.
+
+Therefore the wagon started on up the Mau at six o'clock. Twelve hours
+later we followed. The fine drizzle had set in again. We were very glad
+the wagon had taken advantage of the brief dry time.
+
+From the top of the sheer rise we looked back for the last time over the
+wonderful panorama of the Rift Valley. Before us were wide rounded hills
+covered with a scattered small growth that in general appearance
+resembled scrub oak. It sloped away gently until it was lost in mists.
+Later, when these cleared, we saw distant blue mountains across a
+tremendous shallow basin. We were nearly on a level with the summit of
+Suswa itself, nor did we again drop much below that altitude. After
+five or six miles we overtook the wagon outspanned. The projected
+all-night journey had again been frustrated by the lions. These beasts
+had proved so bold and menacing that finally the team had been forced to
+stop in sheer self-defence. However, the day was cool and overcast, so
+nothing was lost.
+
+After topping the Mau we saw a few gazelle, zebra, and hartebeeste, but
+soon plunged into a bush country quite destitute of game. We were
+paralleling the highest ridge of the escarpment, and so alternated
+between the crossing of canons and the travelling along broad ridges
+between them. In lack of other amusement for a long time I rode with the
+wagon. The country was very rough and rocky. Everybody was excited to
+the point of frenzy, except the wagon. It had a certain Dutch stolidity
+in its manner of calmly and bumpily surmounting such portions of the
+landscape as happened in its way.
+
+After a very long, tiresome march we camped above a little stream.
+Barring our lucky rain this would have been the first water since
+leaving the Kedong River. Here were hundreds of big blue pigeons
+swooping in to their evening drink.
+
+For two days more we repeated this sort of travel, but always with good
+camps at fair-sized streams. Gradually we slanted away from the main
+ridge, though we still continued cross-cutting the swells and ravines
+thrown off its flanks. Only the ravines hour by hour became shallower,
+and the swells lower and broader. On their tops the scrub sometimes gave
+way to openings of short grass. On these fed a few gazelle of both
+sorts, and an occasional zebra or so. We saw also four topi, a beast
+about the size of our wapiti, built on the general specifications of a
+hartebeeste, but with the most beautiful iridescent plum-coloured coat.
+This quartette was very wild. I made three separate stalks on them, but
+the best I could do was 360 paces, at which range I missed.
+
+Finally we surmounted the last low swell to look down a wide and sloping
+plain to the depression in which flowed the principal river of these
+parts, the Southern Guaso Nyero. Beyond it stretched the immense
+oceanlike plains of the Loieta, from which here and there rose isolated
+hills, very distant, like lonesome ships at sea. A little to the left,
+also very distant, we could make out an unbroken blue range of
+mountains. These were our ultimate destination.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII.
+
+THE SOUTHERN GUASO NYERO.
+
+
+The Southern Guaso Nyero, unlike its northern namesake, is a sluggish,
+muddy stream, rather small, flowing between abrupt clay banks. Farther
+down it drops into great canons and eroded abysses, and acquires a
+certain grandeur. But here, at the ford of Agate's Drift, it is
+decidedly unimpressive. Scant greenery ornaments its banks. In fact, at
+most places they run hard and baked to a sheer drop-off of ten or
+fifteen feet. Scattered mimosa trees and aloes mark its course. The
+earth for a mile or so is trampled by thousands of Masai cattle that at
+certain seasons pass through the funnel of this, the only ford for
+miles. Apparently insignificant, it is given to sudden, tremendous
+rises. These originate in the rainfalls of the upper Mau Escarpment,
+many miles away. It behooves the safari to cross promptly if it can,
+and to camp always on the farther bank.
+
+This we did, pitching our tents in a little opening, between clumps of
+pretty flowering aloes and the mimosas. Here, as everywhere in this
+country, until we had passed the barrier of the Narossara mountains, the
+common horseflies were a plague. They follow the Masai cattle. I can
+give you no better idea of their numbers than to tell you two isolated
+facts: I killed twenty-one at one blow; and in the morning, before
+sunrise, the apex of our tent held a solid black mass of the creatures
+running the length of the ridge pole, and from half an inch to two
+inches deep! Every pack was black with them on the march, and the wagon
+carried its millions. When the shadow of a branch would cross that
+slowly lumbering vehicle, the swarm would rise and bumble around
+distractedly for a moment before settling down again. They fairly made a
+nimbus of darkness.
+
+After we had made camp we saw a number of Masai warriors hovering about
+the opposite bank, but they did not venture across. Some of their women
+did, however, and came cheerily into camp. These most interesting people
+are worth more than a casual word, so I shall reserve my observations
+on them until a later chapter. One of our porters, a big Baganda named
+Sabakaki, was suffering severely from pains in the chest that
+subsequently developed into pleurisy. From the Masai women we tried to
+buy some of the milk they carried in gourds; at first they seemed not
+averse, but as soon as they realized the milk was not for our own
+consumption, they turned their backs on poor Sabakaki and refused to
+have anything more to do with us.
+
+These Masai are very difficult to trade with. Their only willing barter
+is done in sheep. These they seem to consider legitimate objects of
+commerce. A short distance from our camp stood three whitewashed round
+houses with thatched, conical roofs, the property of a trader named
+Agate. He was away at the time of our visit.
+
+After an early morning, but vain, attempt to get Billy a shot at a
+lion[22] we set out for our distant blue mountains. The day was a
+journey over plains of great variegation. At times they were covered
+with thin scrub; at others with small groves; or again, they were open
+and grassy. Always they undulated gently, so from their tops one never
+saw as far as he thought he was going to see. As landmark we steered by
+a good-sized butte named Donga Rasha.
+
+Memba Sasa and I marched ahead on foot. In this thin scrub we got
+glimpses of many beasts. At one time we were within fifty yards of a
+band of magnificent eland. By fleeting glimpses we saw also many
+wildebeeste and zebra, with occasionally one of the smaller grass
+antelope. Finally, in an open glade we caught sight of something tawny
+showing in the middle of a bush. It was too high off the ground to be a
+buck. We sneaked nearer. At fifty yards we came to a halt, still
+puzzled. Judging by its height and colour, it should be a lion, but try
+as we would we could not make out what part of his anatomy was thus
+visible. At last I made up my mind to give him a shot from the
+Springfield, with the .405 handy. At the shot the tawny patch heaved and
+lay still. We manoeuvred cautiously, and found we had killed stone dead
+not a lion, but a Bohur reed-buck lying atop an ant hill concealed in
+the middle of the bush. This accounted for its height above the ground.
+As it happened, I very much wanted one of these animals as a specimen,
+so everybody was satisfied.
+
+Shortly after, attracted by a great concourse of carrion birds, both on
+trees and in the air, we penetrated a thicket to come upon a full-grown
+giraffe killed by lions. The claw marks and other indications were
+indubitable. The carcass had been partly eaten, but was rapidly
+vanishing under the attacks of the birds.
+
+Just before noon we passed Donga Rasha and emerged on the open plains.
+Here I caught sight of some Roberts' gazelle, a new species to me, and
+started alone in pursuit. They, as usual, trotted over the nearest rise,
+so with due precautions I followed after. At the top of that rise I lay
+still in astonishment. Before me marched solemnly an unbroken single
+file of game, reaching literally to my limit of vision in both
+directions. They came over the land swell a mile to my left, and they
+were disappearing over another land swell a mile and a half to my right.
+It was rigidly single file, except for the young; the nose of one beast
+fairly touching the tail of the one ahead, and it plodded along at a
+businesslike walk. There were but three species represented--the gnu,
+the zebra, and the hartebeeste. I did not see the head of the
+procession, for it had gone from sight before I arrived; nor did I ever
+see the tail of it either, for the safari appearing inopportunely broke
+its continuance. But I saw two miles and a half, solid, of big game. It
+was a great and formal trek, probably to new pastures.
+
+Then I turned my attention to the Roberts' gazelle, and my good luck
+downed a specimen at 273 yards. This, with the Bohur reed-buck, made the
+second new species for the day. Our luck was not yet over, however. We
+had proceeded but a few miles when Kongoni discovered a herd of topi.
+The safari immediately lay down, while I went ahead. There was little
+cover, and I had a very hard time to get within range, especially as a
+dozen zebras kept grazing across the line of my stalks. The topi
+themselves were very uneasy, crossing and recrossing and looking
+doubtfully in my direction. I had a number of chances at small bucks,
+but refused them in my desire to get a shot at the big leader of the
+herd. Finally he separated from the rest and faced in my direction at
+just 268 yards. At the shot he fell dead.
+
+For the first time we had an opportunity to admire the wonderful pelt.
+It is beautiful in quality, plum colour, with iridescent lights and wavy
+"water marks" changing to pearl colour on the four quarters, with black
+legs. We were both struck with the gorgeousness of a topi motor-rug made
+of three skins, with these pearl spots as accents in the corners. To
+our ambitions and hopes we added more topi.
+
+Our journey to the Narossara River lasted three days in all. We gained
+an outlying spur of the blue mountains, and skirted their base. The
+usual varied foothill country led us through defiles, over ridges, and
+by charming groves. We began to see Masai cattle in great herds. The
+gentle humpbacked beasts were held in close formation by herders afoot,
+tall, lithe young savages with spears. In the distance and through the
+heat haze the beasts shimmered strangely, their glossy reds and whites
+and blacks blending together. In this country of wide expanses and clear
+air we could thus often make out a very far-off herd simply as a speck
+of rich colour against the boundless rolling plains.
+
+Here we saw a good variety of game. Zebras, of course, and hartebeeste;
+the Roberts' gazelle, a few topi, a good many of the gnu or wildebeeste
+discovered and named by Roosevelt; a few giraffes, klipspringer on the
+rocky buttes, cheetah, and the usual jackals, hyenas, etc. I killed one
+very old zebra. So ancient was he that his teeth had worn down to the
+level of the gums, which seemed fairly on the point of closing over.
+Nevertheless he was still fat and sleek. He could not much longer have
+continued to crop the grass. Such extreme age in wild animals is, in
+Africa at least, most remarkable, for generally they meet violent deaths
+while still in their prime.
+
+About three o'clock of the third afternoon we came in sight of a long
+line of forest trees running down parallel with the nearest mountain
+ranges. These marked the course of the Narossara, and by four o'clock we
+were descending the last slope.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[22] See "The Land of Footprints."
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII.
+
+THE LOWER BENCHES.
+
+
+The Narossara is really only about creek size, but as it flows the whole
+year round it merits the title of river. It rises in the junction of a
+long spur with the main ranges, cuts straight across a wide inward bend
+of the mountains, joins them again, plunges down a deep and tremendous
+canon to the level of a second bench below great cliffs, meanders
+peacefully in flowery meadows and delightful glades for some miles, and
+then once more, and most unexpectedly, drops eighteen hundred feet by
+waterfall and precipitous cascade to join the Southern Guaso Nyero. The
+country around this junction is some of the roughest I saw in Africa.
+
+We camped at the spot where the river ran at about its maximum distance
+from the mountains. Our tents were pitched beneath the shade of tall and
+refreshing trees.
+
+A number of Masai women visited us, laughing and joking with Billy in
+their quizzically humorous fashion. Just as we were sitting down at
+table an Englishman wandered out of the greenery and approached. He was
+a small man with a tremendous red beard, wore loose garments and tennis
+shoes, and strolled up, his hands in his pockets and smoking a
+cigarette. This was V., a man of whom we had heard. A member of a
+historical family, officer in a crack English regiment, he had resigned
+everything to come into this wild country. Here he had built a boma, or
+enclosed compound, and engaged himself in acquiring Masai sheep in
+exchange for beads, wire, and cloth. Obviously the profits of such
+transactions could not be the temptation. He liked the life, and he
+liked his position of influence with these proud and savage people.
+Strangely enough, he cared little for the sporting possibilities of the
+country, though of course he did a little occasional shooting; but was
+quite content with his trading, his growing knowledge of and intimacy
+with the Masai, and his occasional tremendous journeys. To the casual
+and infrequent stranger his attitude was reported most uncertain.
+
+We invited him to tea, which he accepted, and we fell into
+conversation. He and C. were already old acquaintances. The man, I
+found, was shy about talking of the things that interested him; but as
+they most decidedly interested us also we managed to convey an
+impression of our sincerity. Thereafter he was most friendly. His
+helpfulness, kindness, and courtesy could not have been bettered. He
+lent us his own boy as guide down through the canons of the Narossara to
+the Lower Benches, where we hoped to find kudu; he offered store-room to
+such of our supplies as we intended holding in reserve; he sent us sheep
+and eggs as a welcome variety to our game diet; and in addition he gave
+us Masai implements and ornaments we could not possibly have acquired in
+any other way. It is impossible to buy the personal belongings of this
+proud and independent people at any price. The price of a spear
+ordinarily runs about two rupees' worth, when one trades with any other
+tribe. I know of a case where a Masai was offered fifty rupees for his
+weapon, but refused scornfully. V. acquired these things through
+friendship; and after we had gained his, he was most generous with them.
+Thus he presented us with a thing almost impossible to get and seen
+rarely outside of museums--the Masai war bonnet, made of the mane of a
+lion. It is in shape and appearance, though not in colour, almost
+exactly like the grenadier's shako of the last century. In addition to
+this priceless trophy, V. also gave us samples of the cattle bells, both
+wooden and metal, ivory ear ornaments, bead bracelets, steel collars,
+circumcision knives, sword belts, and other affairs of like value. But I
+think that the _apogee_ of his kindliness was reached when much later he
+heard from the native tribes that we were engaged in penetrating the
+defiles of the higher mountains. Then he sent after us a swift Masai
+runner bearing to us a bottle of whisky and a message to the effect that
+V. was afraid we would find it very cold up there! Think of what that
+meant; turn it well over in your mind, with all the circumstances of
+distance from supplies, difficulty of transportation and all! We none of
+us used whisky in the tropics, so we later returned it with a suitable
+explanation and thanks as being too good to waste.
+
+Next morning, under guidance of our friend's boy, we set out for the
+Lower Benches, leaving N'gombe Brown and his outfit to camp indefinitely
+until we needed him for the return journey.
+
+The whole lie of the land hereabout is, roughly speaking, in a series of
+shelves. Behind us were the high mountains--the Fourth Bench; we had
+been travelling on the plateau of the Loieta--the Third Bench; now we
+were to penetrate some apparently low hills down an unexpected thousand
+feet to the Second Bench. This was smaller, perhaps only five miles at
+its widest. Its outer rim consisted also of low hills concealing a drop
+of precipitous cliffs. There were no passes nor canons here--the streams
+dropped over in waterfalls--and precarious game trails offered the only
+chance for descent. The First Bench was a mere ledge, a mile or so wide.
+From it one looked down into the deep gorge of the Southern Guaso Nyero,
+and across to a tangle of eroded mountains and malpais that filled the
+eye. Only far off in an incredible distance were other blue mountains
+that marked the other side of the great Rift Valley.
+
+Our present task was to drop from the Third Bench to the Second. For
+some distance we followed the Narossara; then, when it began to drop
+into its tremendous gorge, we continued along the hillsides above it
+until, by means of various "hogs' backs" and tributary canons, we were
+able to regain its level far below. The going was rough and stony, and
+hard on the porters, but the scenery was very wild and fine. We met the
+river bottom again in the pleasantest oval meadow with fine big trees.
+The mountains quite surrounded us, towering imminent above our heads.
+Ahead of us the stream broke through between portals that rose the full
+height of the ranges. We followed it, and found ourselves on the Second
+Bench.
+
+Here was grass, high grass in which the boys were almost lost to sight.
+Behind us the ramparts rose sheer and high, and over across the way were
+some low fifty-foot cliffs that marked a plateau land. Between the
+plateau and the ranges from which we had descended was a sort of slight
+flat valley through which meandered the forest trees that marked the
+stream.
+
+We turned to the right and marched an hour. The river gradually
+approached the plateau, thus leaving between it and the ramparts a
+considerable plain, and some low foothills. These latter were reported
+to be one of the feeding grounds of the greater kudu.
+
+We made a most delightful camp at the edge of great trees by the stream.
+The water flowed at the bottom of a little ravine, precipitous in most
+places, but with gently sloping banks at the spot we had chosen. It
+flowed rapidly over clean gravel, with a hurrying, tinkling sound. A
+broad gravel beach was spread on the hither side of it, like a spacious
+secret room in the jungle. Here too was a clear little slope on which to
+sit, with the thicket all about, the clean, swift little stream below,
+the high forest arches above, and the inquisitive smaller creatures
+hovering near. Others had been here before us, the wild things, taking
+advantage of the easy descent to drinking water--eland, buffalo,
+leopard, and small bucks. The air was almost cloyingly sweet with a
+perfume like sage-brush honey.
+
+Our first task was to set our boys to work clearing a space; the grass
+was so high and rank that mere trampling had little effect on it. The
+Baganda, Sabakaki, we had been compelled to leave with the ox team. So
+our twenty-seven had become twenty-six.
+
+Next morning C. and I started out very early with one gunbearer. The
+direction of the wind compelled us to a two hours' walk before we could
+begin to hunt. The high grass was soaked with a very heavy dew, and
+shortly we were as wet as though we had fallen into the river. A number
+of hornbills and parrots followed us for some distance, but soon left us
+in peace. We saw the Roberts' gazelle and some hartebeeste.
+
+When we had gained a point of vantage, we turned back and began to work
+slowly along the base of the mountains. We kept on a general level a
+hundred feet or so up their slope, just high enough to give us a point
+of overlook for anything that might stir either in the flat plateau
+foothills or the plains. We also kept a sharp lookout for signs.
+
+We had proceeded in this manner for an hour when in an opening between
+two bushes below us, and perhaps five hundred yards away, we saw a
+leopard standing like a statue, head up, a most beautiful spectacle.
+While we watched her through the glasses, she suddenly dropped flat out
+of sight. The cause we discovered to be three hartebeeste strolling
+sociably along, stopping occasionally to snatch a mouthful, but headed
+always in the direction of the bushes behind which lay the great cat.
+Much interested, we watched them. They disappeared behind the screen. A
+sudden flash marked the leopard's spring. Two badly demoralized
+hartebeeste stamped out into the open and away; two only. The kill had
+been made.
+
+We had only the one rifle with us, for we were supposed to be out after
+kudu only, and were travelling as light as possible. No doubt the
+Springfield would kill a leopard, if the bullet landed in the right
+place. We discussed the matter. It ended, of course, in our sneaking
+down there; I with the Springfield, and C. with his knife unsheathed.
+Our precautions and trepidations were wasted. The leopard had carried
+the hartebeeste bodily some distance, had thrust it under a bush, and
+had departed. C. surmised it would return towards evening.
+
+Therefore we continued after kudu. We found old signs, proving that the
+beasts visited this country, but nothing fresh. We saw, however, the
+first sing-sing, some impalla, some klipspringer, and Chanler's
+reed-buck.
+
+At evening we made a crafty stalk atop the mesa-like foothills to a
+point overlooking the leopard's kill. We lay here looking the place over
+inch by inch through our glasses, when an ejaculation of disgust from
+Kongoni called our attention. There at another spot that confounded
+beast sat like a house cat watching us cynically. Either we had come too
+soon, or she had heard us and retired to what she considered a safe
+distance. There was of course no chance of getting nearer; so I sat
+down, for a steadier hold, and tried her anyway. At the shot she leaped
+high in the air, rolled over once, then recovered her feet and streaked
+off at full speed. Just before disappearing over a slight rise, she
+stopped to look back. I tried her again. We concluded this shot a miss,
+as the distance and light were such that only sheer luck could have
+landed the bullet. However, that luck was with us. Later developments
+showed that both shots had hit. One cut a foreleg, but without breaking
+a bone, and the other had hit the paunch. One was at 380 paces and the
+other at 490.
+
+We found blood on the trail, and followed it a hundred yards and over a
+small ridge to a wide patch of high grass. It was now dark, the grass
+was very high, and the animal probably desperate. The situation did not
+look good to us, badly armed as we were. So we returned to camp,
+resolved to take up the trail again in the morning.
+
+Every man in camp turned out next day to help beat the grass. C., with
+the .405, stayed to direct and protect the men; while I, with the
+Springfield, sat down at the head of the ravine. Soon I could hear the
+shrieks, rattles, shouts, and whistles of the line of men as they beat
+through the grass. Small grass bucks and hares bounded past me; birds
+came whirring by. I sat on a little ant hill spying as hard as I could
+in all directions. Suddenly the beaters fell to dead silence. Guessing
+this as a signal to me that the beast had been seen, I ran to climb a
+higher ant hill to the left. From there I discerned the animal plainly,
+sneaking along belly to earth, exactly in the manner of a cat after a
+sparrow. It was not a woods-leopard, but the plains-leopard, or cheetah,
+supposed to be a comparatively harmless beast.
+
+At my shot she gave one spring forward and rolled over into the grass.
+The nearest porters yelled, and rushed in. I ran, too, as fast as I
+could, but was not able to make myself heard above the row. An instant
+later the beast came to its feet with a savage growl and charged the
+nearest of the men. She was crippled, and could not move as quickly as
+usual, but could hobble along faster than her intended victim could run.
+This was a tall and very conceited Kavirondo. He fled, but ran around in
+circles in and out of his excited companions. The cheetah followed him,
+and him only, with most single-minded purpose.
+
+I dared not shoot while men were in the line of fire even on the other
+side of the cheetah, for I knew the high-power bullet would at that
+range go right on through, and I fairly split my throat trying to clear
+the way. It seemed five minutes, though it was probably only as many
+seconds, before I got my chance. It was high time. The cheetah had
+reared to strike the man down.[23] My shot bowled her over. She jumped
+to her feet again, made another dash at the thoroughly scared Kavirondo,
+and I killed her just at his coat-tails.
+
+The cheetahs ordinarily are supposed to be cowards, although their size
+and power are equal to that of other leopards. Nobody is afraid of them.
+Yet this particular animal charged with all the ferocity and
+determination of the lion, and would certainly have killed or badly
+mauled my man.[24] To be sure it had been wounded, and had had all night
+to think about it.
+
+In the relief from the tension we all burst into shrieks of laughter;
+all except the near-victim of the scrimmage, who managed only a sickly
+smile. Our mirth was short. Out from a thicket over a hundred yards away
+walked one of the men, who had been in no way involved in the fight,
+calmly announcing that he had been shot. We were sceptical, but he
+turned his back and showed us the bullet hole at the lower edge of the
+ribs. One of my bullets, after passing through the cheetah, had
+ricocheted and picked this poor fellow out from the whole of an empty
+landscape. And this after I had delayed my rescue fairly to the point of
+danger in order to avoid all chance of hurting some one!
+
+We had no means of telling how deeply the bullet had penetrated; so we
+reassured the man, and detailed two men to assist him back to camp by
+easy stages. He did not seem to be suffering much pain, and he had lost
+little strength.
+
+At camp, however, we found that the wound was deep. C. generously
+offered to make a forced march in order to get the boy out to a
+hospital. By hitting directly across the rough country below the benches
+it was possible to shorten the journey somewhat, provided V. could
+persuade the Masai to furnish a guide. The country was a desert, and the
+water scarce. We lined up our remaining twenty-six men and selected the
+twelve best and strongest. These we offered a month and a half's extra
+wages for the trip. We then made a hammock out of one of the ground
+cloths, and the same afternoon C. started. I sent with him four of my
+own men as far as the ox-wagon for the purpose of bringing back more
+supplies. They returned the next afternoon bringing also a report from
+C. that all was well so far, and that he had seen a lion. He made the
+desert trip without other casualty than the lost of his riding mule, and
+landed the wounded man in the hospital all right. In spite of C.'s
+expert care on the journey out, and the best of treatment later, the
+boy, to my great distress, died eleven days after reaching the hospital.
+C. was gone just two weeks.
+
+In the meantime I sent out my best trackers in all directions to look
+for kudu signs, conceiving this the best method of covering the country
+rapidly. In this manner I shortly determined that chances were small
+here, and made up my mind to move down to the edge of the bench where
+the Narossara makes its plunge. Before doing so, however, I hunted for
+and killed a very large eland bull reported by Mavrouki. This beast was
+not only one of the largest I ever saw, but was in especially fine coat.
+He stood five feet six inches high at the shoulder; was nine feet eight
+inches long, without the tail; and would weigh twenty-five hundred
+pounds. The men were delighted with this acquisition. I now had fourteen
+porters, the three gunbearers, the cook, and the two boys. They
+surrounded each tiny fire with switches full of roasting meat; they cut
+off great hunks for a stew; they made quantities of biltong, or jerky.
+
+Next day I left Kongoni and one porter at the old camp, loaded my men
+with what they could carry, and started out. We marched a little over
+two hours; then found ourselves beneath a lone mimosa tree about a
+quarter-mile from the edge of the bench. At this point the stream drops
+into a little canon preparatory to its plunge; and the plateau rises
+ever so gently in tremendous cliffs. I immediately dispatched the
+porters back for another load. A fine sing-sing lured me across the
+river. I did not get the sing-sing, but had a good fight with two lions,
+as narrated elsewhere.[A]
+
+In this spot we camped a number of days; did a heap of hard climbing and
+spying; killed another lion out of a band of eight;[25] thoroughly
+determined that we had come at the wrong time for kudu, and decided on
+another move.
+
+This time our journey lasted five hours, so that our relaying consumed
+three days. We broke back through the ramparts, by means of another
+pass we had discovered when looking for kudu, to the Third Bench again.
+Here we camped in the valley of Lengeetoto.
+
+This valley is one of the most beautiful and secluded in this part of
+Africa. It is shaped like an ellipse, five or six miles long by about
+three miles wide, and is completely surrounded by mountains. The
+ramparts of the western side--those forming the walls of the Fourth
+Bench--rise in sheer rock cliffs, forest crowned. To the east, from
+which direction we had just come, were high, rounded mountains. At
+sunrise they cut clear in an outline of milky slate against the sky.
+
+The floor of this ellipse was surfaced in gentle undulations, like the
+low swells of a summer sea. Between each swell a singing, clear-watered
+brook leapt and dashed or loitered through its jungle. Into the
+mountains ran broad upward-flung valleys of green grass; and groves of
+great forest trees marched down canons and out a short distance into the
+plains. Everything was fresh and green and cool. We needed blankets at
+night, and each morning the dew was cool and sparkling, and the sky very
+blue. Underneath the forest trees of the stream beds and the canon were
+leafy rooms as small as a closet, or great as cathedral aisles. And in
+the short brush dwelt rhinoceros and impalla; in the jungles were
+buffalo and elephant; on the plains we saw giraffe, hartebeeste, zebra,
+duiker; and in the bases of the hills we heard at evening and early
+morning the roaring of lions.
+
+In this charming spot we lingered eight days. Memba Sasa and I spent
+most of our time trying to get one of the jungle-dwelling buffalo
+without his getting us. In this we were finally successful.[26] Then, as
+it was about time for C. to return, we moved back to V.'s boma on the
+Narossara; relaying, as usual, the carrying of our effects. At this time
+I had had to lay off three more men on account of various sorts of
+illness, so was still more cramped for transportation facilities. As we
+were breaking camp a lioness leaped to her feet from where she had been
+lying under a bush. So near was it to camp that I had not my rifle
+ready. She must have been lying there within two hundred yards of our
+tents, watching all our activities.
+
+We drew into V.'s boma a little after two o'clock. The man in charge of
+our tent did not put in an appearance until next day. Fortunately V. had
+an extra tent, which he lent us. We camped near the river, just outside
+the edge of the river forest. The big trees sent their branches out over
+us very far above, while a winding path led us to the banks of the river
+where was a dingle like an inner room. After dark we sat with V. at our
+little camp fire. It was all very beautiful--the skyful of tropical
+stars, the silhouette of the forest shutting them out, the velvet
+blackness of the jungle flickering with fireflies, the purer outlines of
+the hilltops and distant mountains to the left, the porters' tiny fires
+before the little white tents; and in the distance, from the direction
+of V.'s boma, the irregular throb of the dance drum and the occasional
+snatch of barbaric singing borne down on the night wind from where his
+Wakambas were holding an n'goma. A pair of ibis that had been ejected
+when we made camp contributed intermittent outraged and raucous squawks
+from the tiptop of some neighbouring tree.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[23] This is an interesting fact--that she reared to strike instead of
+springing.
+
+[24] It must be remembered that this beast had the evening before killed
+a 350-pound hartebeeste with ease.
+
+[25] "The Land of Footprints."
+
+[26] "The Land of Footprints."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX.
+
+NOTES ON THE MASAI.
+
+
+It is in no way my intention to attempt a comprehensive description of
+this unique people. My personal observation is, of course, inadequate to
+that task, and the numerous careful works on the subject are available
+to the interested reader.
+
+The southern branch of the race, among whom we were now travelling, are
+very fine physically. Men close to seven feet in height are not at all
+uncommon, and the average is well above six. They are strongly and
+lithely made. Their skins are a red-brown or bronze, generally brought
+to a high state of polish by liberal anointing. In feature they resemble
+more the Egyptian or Abyssinian than the negro cast of countenance. The
+women are tall and well formed, with proud, quaintly quizzical faces.
+Their expressions and demeanour seem to indicate more independence and
+initiative than is usual with most savage women, but whether this is
+actually so or not I cannot say.
+
+On this imposing and pleasing physical foundation your true Masai is
+content to build a very slight superstructure of ornament. His ear-lobes
+are always stretched to hang down in long loops, in which small medals,
+ornaments, decorated blocks of wood, or the like, are inserted. Long,
+heavy ovals of ivory, grooved to accommodate the flesh loop, very finely
+etched in decorative designs, are occasionally worn as "stretchers."
+Around the neck is a slender iron collar, and on the arms are one or two
+glittering bracelets. The sword belt is of leather heavily beaded, with
+a short dangling fringe of steel beads. Through this the short blade is
+thrust. When in full dress the warrior further sports a hollow iron knee
+bell, connected with the belt by a string of cowrie shells or beads.
+Often is added a curious triangular strip of skin fitting over the
+chest, and reaching about to the waist. A robe or short cloak of
+short-haired sheepskin is sometimes carried for warmth, but not at all
+for modesty. The weapons are a long, narrow-bladed heavy spear, the
+buffalo hide shield, the short sword, and the war club or rungs. The
+women are always shaven-headed, wear voluminous robes of soft leather,
+and carry a great weight of heavy wire wound into anklets and stockings,
+and brought to a high state of polish. So extensive are these
+decorations that they really form a sort of armour, with breaks only for
+the elbow and the knee joints. The married women wear also a great
+outstanding collar.
+
+The Masai are pastoral, and keep immense herds and flocks. Therefore
+they inhabit the grazing countries, and are nomadic. Their villages are
+invariably arranged in a wide circle, the low huts of mud and wattles
+facing inwards. The spaces between the huts are filled in with thick
+dense thorn brush, thus enclosing a strong corral, or boma. These
+villages are called manyattas. They are built by the women in an
+incredibly brief space of time. Indeed, an overchief stopping two days
+at one place has been known to cause the construction of a complete
+village, to serve only for that period. He then moved on, and the
+manyatta was never used again! Nevertheless these low rounded huts, in
+shape like a loaf of bread, give a fictitious impression of great
+strength and permanency. The smooth and hardened mud resembles masonry
+or concrete work. As a matter of fact it is the thinnest sort of a shell
+over plaited withies. The single entrance to this compound may be
+closed by thorn bush, so that at night, when the lions are abroad, the
+Masai and all his herds dwell quite peaceably and safely inside the
+boma. Twelve to twenty huts constitute a village.
+
+When the grass is fed down, the village moves to a new location. There
+is some regulation about this, determined by the overchiefs, so that one
+village does not interfere with another. Beside the few articles of
+value or of domestic use, the only things carried away from an old
+village are the strongly-woven shield-shaped doors. These are strapped
+along the flanks of the donkeys, while the other goods rest between. A
+donkey pack, Masai fashion, is a marvellous affair that would not stay
+on ten minutes for a white man.
+
+The Masai perform no agriculture whatever, nor will they eat game meat.
+They have no desire whatever for any of the white man's provisions
+except sugar. In fact; their sole habitual diet is mixed cow's blood and
+milk--no fruits, no vegetables, no grains, rarely flesh; a striking
+commentary on extreme vegetarian claims. The blood they obtain by
+shooting a very sharp-pointed arrow into the neck vein of the cow. After
+the requisite amount has been drained, the wound is closed and the
+animal turned into the herd to recuperate. The blood and milk are then
+shaken together in long gourds. Certainly the race seems to thrive on
+this strange diet. Only rarely, on ceremonial occasions or when
+transportation is difficult, do they eat mutton or goat flesh, but never
+beef.
+
+Of labour, then, about a Masai village, it follows that there is
+practically none. The women build the manyattas; there is no cooking, no
+tilling of the soil, no searching for wild fruits. The herd have to be
+watched by day, and driven in at the fall of night; that is the task of
+the boys and the youths who have not gone through with the quadriennial
+circumcision ceremonies and become El-morani, or warriors. Therefore the
+grown men are absolutely and completely gentlemen of leisure. In
+civilization, the less men do the more important they are inclined to
+think themselves. It is so here. Socially the Masai consider themselves
+several cuts above anybody else in the country. As social superiority
+lies mostly in thinking so hard enough--so that the inner belief
+expresses itself in the outward attitude and manner--the Masai carry it
+off. Their haughtiness is magnificent. Also they can look as unsmiling
+and bored as anybody anywhere. Consequently they are either greatly
+admired, or greatly hated and feared, as the case happens to be, by all
+the other tribes. The Kikuyu young men frankly ape the customs and
+ornaments of their powerful neighbours. Even the British Government
+treats them very gingerly indeed, and allows these economically useless
+savages a latitude the more agricultural tribes do not enjoy. Yet I
+submit that any people whose property is in immense herds can more
+easily be brought to terms than those who have nothing so valuable to
+lose.
+
+As a matter of fact the white man and the Masai have never had it out.
+When the English, a few years since, were engaged in opening the country
+they carried on quite a stoutly contested little war with the Wakamba.
+These people put up so good a fight that the English anticipated a most
+bitter struggle with the Masai, whose territory lay next beyond. To
+their surprise the Masai made peace.
+
+"We have watched the war with the Wakamba," they said, in effect, "and
+we have seen the Wakamba kill a great many of your men. But more of your
+men came in always, and there were no more Wakamba to come in and take
+the places of those who were killed. We are not afraid. If we should war
+with you, we would undoubtedly kill a great many of you, and you would
+undoubtedly kill a great many of us. But there can be no use in that. We
+want the ranges for our cattle; you want a road. Let us then agree."
+
+The result is that to-day the Masai look upon themselves as an
+unconquered people, and bear themselves--_towards the other
+tribes_--accordingly. The shrewd common sense and observation evidenced
+above must have convinced them that war now would be hopeless.
+
+This acute intelligence is not at all incompatible with the rather
+bigoted and narrow outlook on life inevitable to a people whose ideals
+are made up of fancied superiorities over the rest of mankind. Witness,
+the feudal aristocracies of the Middle Ages.
+
+With this type the underlying theory of masculine activity is the
+military. Some outlet for energy was needed, and in war it was found.
+Even the ordinary necessities of primitive agriculture and of the chase
+were lacking. The Masai ate neither vegetable, grain, nor wild game. His
+whole young manhood, then, could be spent in no better occupation than
+the pursuit of warlike glory--and cows.
+
+On this rested the peculiar social structure of the people. In perusing
+the following fragmentary account the reader must first of all divest
+his mind of what he would, according to white man's standards, consider
+moral or immoral. Such things must be viewed from the standpoint of the
+people believing in them. The Masai are moral in the sense that they
+very rigorously live up to their own customs and creeds. Their women are
+strictly chaste in the sense that they conduct no affairs outside those
+permitted within the tribe. No doubt, from the Masai point of view, we
+are ourselves immoral.
+
+The small boy, as soon as he is big enough to be responsible--and that
+is very early in life--is given, in company with others, charge of a
+flock of sheep. Thence he graduates to the precious herds of cows. He
+wears little or nothing; is armed with a throwing club (a long stick),
+or perhaps later a broad-bladed, short-headed spear of a pattern
+peculiar to boys and young men. His life is thus over the free open
+hills and veld until, somewhere between the ages of eighteen and
+twenty-one, the year of the circumcision comes. Then he enters on the
+long ceremonies that initiate him into the warrior class. My knowledge
+of the details of this subject is limited; for while I had the luck to
+be in Masailand on the fourth year, such things are not exhibited
+freely. The curious reader can find more on the subject in other books;
+but as this is confined to personal experiences I will tell only what I
+have myself elicited.
+
+The youth's shaved head is allowed to grow its hair. He hangs around his
+brow a dangling string of bright-coloured bird skins stuffed out in the
+shape of little cylinders, so that at a short distance they look like
+curls. For something like a month of probation he wears these, then
+undergoes the rite. For ten days thereafter he and his companions, their
+heads daubed with clay and ashes, clad in long black robes, live out in
+the brush. They have no provision, but are privileged to steal what they
+need. At the end of the ten days they return to the manyattas. A
+three-day n'goma, or dance, now completes their transformation to the
+El-morani class. It finishes by an obscene night dance, in the course of
+which the new warriors select their partners.
+
+For ten or twelve years these young men are El-morani. They dwell in a
+separate manyatta. With them dwell promiscuously all the young unmarried
+women of the tribe. There is no permanent pairing off, no individual
+property, no marriage. Nor does this constitute flagrant immorality,
+difficult as it may be for us to see that fact. The institution, like
+all national institutions, must have had its origin in a very real need
+and a very practical expediency. The fighting strength of the tribe must
+be kept up, and by the young and vigorous stock. On the other hand,
+every man of military age must be foot free to serve in the constant
+wars and forays. This institution is the means. And, mind you,
+unchastity in the form of illicit intercourse outside the manyatta of
+the El-morani, whether with her own or another tribe, subjects the women
+to instant death.
+
+The El-morani in full fighting rig are imposing. They are, as I have
+explained, tall and of fine physique. The cherished and prized weapon is
+the long, narrow-bladed spear. This is five and six feet long, with a
+blade over three feet by as many inches, and with a long iron shoe. In
+fact, only a bare hand-hold of wood is provided. It is of formidable
+weight, but so well balanced that a flip cast with the wrist will drive
+it clear through an enemy. A short sword and a heavy-headed war club
+complete the offensive weapons. The shield is of buffalo hide, oval in
+shape, and decorated with a genuine heraldry, based on genealogy. A
+circlet of black ostrich feathers in some branches surrounds the face
+and stands high above the head. In the southern districts the warriors
+wear two single black ostrich plumes tied one either side the head, and
+slanting a little backwards. They walk with a mincing step, so that the
+two feathers bob gently up and down like the waving of the circus
+equestrienne's filmy skirts.
+
+Naturally the Masai with the Zulu were the most dreaded of all the
+tribes of Africa. They were constantly raiding in all directions as far
+as their sphere of operations could reach, capturing cattle and women as
+the prizes of war. Now that the white man has put a stop to the
+ferocious intertribal wars, the El-morani are out of a job. The military
+organization is still carried on as before. What will happen to the
+morals of the people it would be difficult to say. The twelve years of
+imposed peace have not been long enough seriously to deteriorate the
+people; but, inevitably, complete idleness will tell. Either the people
+must change their ideals and become industrious--which is extremely
+unlikely--or they will degenerate.
+
+As a passing thought, it is a curious and formidable fact that the
+prohibition of intertribal wars and forays all through East Central
+Africa had already permitted the population to increase to a point of
+discomfort. Many of the districts are becoming so crowded as to
+overflow. What will happen in the long run only time can tell--famines
+are weakening things, while war at least hardens a nation's fibre. This
+is not necessarily an argument for war. Only everywhere in the world the
+white man seems, with the best of intentions, to be upsetting natural
+balances without substituting anything for them. We are better at
+preventing things than causing them.
+
+At the age of thirty, or thereabout, the El-morani becomes an Elder. He
+may now drink and smoke, vices that in the Spartan days of his military
+service were rigorously denied him. He may also take a wife or wives,
+according to his means, and keep herds of cattle. His wives he purchases
+from their parents, the usual medium of payment being cows or sheep. The
+young women who have been living in the El-morani village are considered
+quite as desirable as the young virgins. If there are children, these
+are taken over by the husband. They are considered rather a
+recommendation than a detriment, for they prove the girl is fruitful.
+
+Relieved of all responsibility, the ex-warrior now has full leisure to
+be a gentleman. He drinks a fermented liquor made from milk; he takes
+snuff or smokes the rank native tobacco; he conducts interminable
+diplomatic negotiations; he oversees minutely the forms of ceremonials;
+he helps to shape the policies of his manyatta, and he gives his
+attention to the accumulation of cows.
+
+The cow is the one thing that arouses the Masai's full energies. He will
+undertake any journey, any task, any danger, provided the reward
+therefor is horned cattle. And a cow is the one thing he will on no
+account trade, sell, destroy. A very few of them he milks, and a very
+few of them he periodically bleeds; but the majority, to the numbers of
+thousands upon thousands, live uselessly until they die of old age. They
+are branded, generally on the flanks or ribs, with strange large brands,
+and are so constantly handled that they are tamer and more gentle than
+sheep. I have seen upwards of a thousand head in sole charge of two old
+women on foot. These ancient dames drove the beasts in a long file to
+water, then turned them quite easily and drove them back again. Opposite
+our camp they halted their charges and came to make us a long visit. The
+cattle stood in their tracks until the call was over; not one offered
+even to stray off the baked earth in search of grasses.
+
+The Masai cattle king knows his property individually. Each beast has
+its name. Some of the wealthier are worth in cattle, at settler's
+prices, close to a hundred thousand dollars. They are men of importance
+in their own council huts, but they lack many things dear to the savage
+heart simply because they are unwilling to part with a single head of
+stock in order to procure them.
+
+In the old days forays and raids tended more or less to keep the stock
+down. Since the White Man's Peace the herds are increasing. In the
+country between the Mau Escarpment and the Narossara Mountains we found
+the feed eaten down to the earth two months before the next rainy
+season. In the meantime the few settlers are hard put to it to buy
+cattle at any price wherewith to stock their new farms. The situation is
+an anomaly which probably cannot continue. Some check will have
+eventually to be devised, either limiting the cattle, or compelling an
+equitable sale of the surplus. Certainly the present situation
+represents a sad economic waste--of the energies of a fine race
+destined to rust away, and of the lives of tens of thousands of valuable
+beasts brought into existence only to die of old age. If these matchless
+herders and cattle breeders could be brought into relation with the
+world's markets everybody would be the better.
+
+Besides his sacred cattle the Masai raises also lesser herds of the
+hairy sheep of the country. These he used for himself only on the rare
+occasions of solitary forced marches away from his herds, or at the
+times of ceremony. Their real use is as a trading medium--for more
+cattle! Certain white men and Somalis conduct regular trading
+expeditions into Masailand, bringing in small herds of cows bought with
+trade goods from the other tribes. These they barter with the Masai for
+sheep. In Masai estimation a cow is the most valuable thing on earth,
+while a sheep is only a medium of exchange. With such notions it is easy
+to see that the white man can make an advantageous exchange, in spite of
+the Masai's well-known shrewdness at a bargain. Each side is satisfied.
+There remains only to find a market for the sheep--an easy matter. A
+small herd of cows will, in the long run, bring quite a decent profit.
+
+The Masai has very little use for white man's products. He will trade
+for squares of cloth, beads of certain kinds and in a limited quantity,
+brass and iron wire of heavy gauge, blankets and sugar. That, barring
+occasional personal idiosyncrasy, is about all. For these things he will
+pay also in sheep. Masai curios are particularly difficult to get hold
+of. I rather like them for their independence in that respect. I
+certainly should refuse to sell my tennis shoes from my feet merely
+because some casual Chinaman happened to admire them!
+
+The women seem to occupy a position quite satisfactory to themselves. To
+be sure they do the work; but there is not much work! They appear to be
+well treated; at least they are always in good spirits, laughing and
+joking with each other, and always ready with quick repartee to remarks
+flung at them by the safari boys. They visited camp freely, and would
+sit down for a good lively afternoon of joking. Their expressions were
+quizzical, with a shy intelligent humour. In spite of the apparent
+unabashed freedom of their deportment they always behaved with the
+utmost circumspection; nor did our boys ever attempt any familiarity.
+The unobtrusive lounging presence in the background of two warriors
+with long spears may have had something to do with this.
+
+The Masai government is centred in an overlord or king. His orders
+seemed to be implicitly obeyed. The present king I do not know, as the
+old king, Lenani, had just died at an advanced age. In former days the
+traveller on entering Masailand was met by a sub-chief. This man planted
+his long spear upright in the ground, and the intending traveller flung
+over it coils of the heavy wire. A very generous traveller who
+completely covered the spear then had no more trouble. One less lavish
+was likely to be held up for further impositions as he penetrated the
+country. This tax was called the honga.
+
+The Masai language is one of the most difficult of all the native
+tongues. In fact, the white man is almost completely unable even to
+pronounce many of the words. V., who is a "Masai-man," who knows them
+intimately, and who possesses their confidence, does not pretend to talk
+with them in their own tongue, but employs the universal Swahili.
+
+
+
+
+XL.
+
+THROUGH THE ENCHANTED FOREST.
+
+
+We delayed at V.'s boma three days, waiting for C. to turn up. He
+maintained a little force of Wakamba, as the Masai would not take
+service. The Wakamba are a hunting tribe, using both the spear and the
+poisoned arrow to kill their game. Their bows are short and powerful,
+and the arrows exceedingly well fashioned. The poison is made from the
+wood of a certain fat tree, with fruit like gigantic bologna sausages.
+It is cut fine, boiled, and the product evaporated away until only a
+black sticky substance remains. Into this the point of the arrow is
+dipped; and the head is then protected until required by a narrow strip
+of buckskin wound around and around it. I have never witnessed the
+effects of this poison; but V. told me he had seen an eland die in
+twenty-two minutes from so slight a wound in the shoulder that it ran
+barely a hundred yards before stopping. The poison more or less loses
+its efficiency, however, after the sticky, tarlike substance has dried
+out.
+
+I offered a half-rupee as a prize for an archery competition, for I was
+curious to get a view of their marksmanship. The bull's-eye was a piece
+of typewriter paper at thirty paces.[27] This they managed to puncture
+only once out of fifteen tries, though they never missed it very widely.
+V. seemed quite put out at this poor showing, so I suppose they can
+ordinarily do better; but I imagine they are a good deal like our
+hunting Indians--poor shots, but very skilful at stalking close to a
+beast.
+
+Our missing porter, with the tent, was brought in next afternoon by
+Kongoni, who had gone in search of him. The man was a big, strong
+Kavirondo. He was sullen, and merely explained that he was "tired." This
+excuse for a five hours' march after eight days' rest! I fined him eight
+rupees, which I gave Kongoni, and ordered him twenty-five lashes. Six
+weeks later he did the same trick. C. allotted him fifty lashes, and had
+him led thereafter by a short rope around the neck. He was probably
+addicted to opium. This was the only man to be formally kibokoed on the
+whole trip--a good testimony at once to C.'s management, the
+discrimination we had used in picking them out, and the settled
+reputations we had by now acquired.
+
+After C.'s return we prepared to penetrate straight back through the
+great rampart of mountains to the south and west.
+
+We crossed the bush-grown plains, and entered a gently rising long canon
+flanked on either side by towering ranges that grew higher and higher
+the farther we proceeded. In the very centre of the mountains,
+apparently, this canon ended in a small round valley. There appeared to
+be no possible exit, save by the way we had come, or over the almost
+perpendicular ridges a thousand feet or more above. Nevertheless, we
+discovered a narrow ravine that slanted up into the hills to the left.
+Following it we found ourselves very shortly in a great forest on the
+side of a mountain. Hanging creepers brushed our faces, tangled vines
+hung across our view, strange and unexpected openings offered themselves
+as a means through which we could see a little closer into the heart of
+mystery. The air was cool and damp and dark. The occasional shafts of
+sunlight or glimpses of blue sky served merely to accentuate the soft
+gloom. Save that we climbed always, we could not tell where we were
+going.
+
+The ascent occupied a little over an hour. Then through the tree trunks
+and undergrowth we caught the sky-line of the crest. When we topped this
+we took a breath, and prepared ourselves for a corresponding descent.
+But in a hundred yards we popped out of the forest to find ourselves on
+a new level. The Fourth Bench had been attained.
+
+It was a grass country of many low, rounded hills and dipping valleys,
+with fine isolated oaklike trees here and there in the depressions, and
+compact, beautiful oaklike groves thrown over the hills like blankets.
+Well-kept, green, trim, intimate, it should have had church spires and
+gray roofs in appropriate spots. It was a refreshment to the eye after
+the great and austere spaces among which we had been dwelling, repose to
+the spirit after the alert and dangerous lands. The dark-curtained
+forest seemed, fancifully, an enchantment through which we had gained to
+this remote smiling land, nearest of all to the blue sky.
+
+We continued south for two days; and then, as the narrative will show,
+were forced to return. We found it always the same type; pleasant sleepy
+little valleys winding around and between low hills crowned with soft
+groves and forests. It was for all the world like northern Surrey, or
+like some of the live oak country of California. Only this we soon
+discovered: in spite of the enchantment of the magic-protecting forest,
+the upper benches too were subject to the spell that lies over all
+Africa. These apparently little valleys were in reality the matter of an
+hour's journey to cross; these rounded hills, to all seeming only two
+good golf strokes from bottom to top, were matters of serious climbing;
+these compact, squared groves of oaklike trees were actually great
+forests of giants in which one could lose one's self for days, in which
+roamed herds of elephant and buffalo. It looked compact because we could
+see all its constituent elements. As a matter of fact, it was neat and
+tidy; only we were, as usual, too small for it.
+
+At the end of two hours' fast marching we had made the distance, say,
+from the clubhouse to the second hole. Then we camped in a genuinely
+little grove of really small trees overlooking a green valley bordered
+with wooded hills. The prospect was indescribably delightful; a sort of
+Sunday-morning landscape of groves and green grass and a feeling of
+church bells.
+
+Only down the valley, diminished by distance, all afternoon Masai
+warriors, in twos and threes, trooped by, mincing along so that their
+own ostrich feathers would bob up and down, their spears held aslant.
+
+We began to realize that we were indeed in a new country when our noon
+thermometer registered only 66 degrees, and when at sunrise the
+following morning it stood at 44 degrees. To us, after eight months
+under the equator, this was bitter weather!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[27] Eight by ten and a half inches.
+
+
+
+
+XLI.
+
+NAIOKOTUKU.
+
+
+Next morning we marched on up the beautiful valley through shoulder-high
+grasses wet with dew. At the end of two hours we came to the limit of
+Leyeye's knowledge of the country. It would now be necessary to find
+savage guides.
+
+Accordingly, while we made camp, C., with Leyeye as interpreter,
+departed in search of a Masai village. So tall and rank grew the grass,
+that we had to clear it out as one would clear brushwood in order to
+make room for our tents.
+
+Several hours later C. returned. He had found a very large village; but
+unfortunately the savages were engaged in a big n'goma which could not
+be interrupted by mere business. However, the chief was coming to make a
+friendly call. When the n'goma should be finished, he would be
+delighted to furnish us with anything we might desire.
+
+Almost on the heels of this the chief arrived. He was a fine old savage,
+over six feet tall, of well proportioned figure, and with a shrewd,
+intelligent face. The n'goma had him to a limited extent, for he
+stumbled over tent ropes, smiled a bit uncertainly, and slumped down
+rather suddenly when he had meant to sit. However, he stumbled, smiled,
+and slumped with unassailable dignity.
+
+From beneath his goatskin robe he produced a long ornamented gourd, from
+which he offered us a drink of fermented milk. He took our refusal
+good-naturedly. The gourd must have held a gallon, but he got away with
+all of its contents in the course of the interview; also several pints
+of super-sweetened coffee which we doled out to him a little at a time,
+and which he seemed to appreciate extravagantly.
+
+Through Leyeye we exchanged the compliments of the day, and, after the
+African custom, told each other how important we were. Our visitor
+turned out to be none other than the brother of Lenani, the paramount
+chief of all the Masai. I forget what I was, either the brother of King
+George or the nephew of Theodore Roosevelt--the only two white men
+_every_ native has heard of. It may be that both of us were mistaken,
+but from his evident authority over a very wide district we were
+inclined to believe our visitor.
+
+We told him we wanted guides through the hills to the southward. He
+promised them in a most friendly fashion.
+
+"I do not know the white man," said he. "I live always in these
+mountains. But my brother Lenani told me ten years ago that some day the
+white man would come into my country. My brother told me that when the
+white man came travelling in my country I must treat him well, for the
+white man is a good friend but a bad enemy. I have remembered my brother
+Lenani's words, though they were spoken a long time ago. The white man
+has been very long in coming; but now he is here. Therefore I have
+brought you milk to-day, and to-morrow I will send you sheep; and later
+I will send young men who know the hills to take you where you wish to
+go."
+
+We expressed gratification, and I presented him with a Marble fish
+knife. The very thin blade and the ingenious manner in which the two
+halves of the handle folded forward over it pleased him immensely.
+
+"No one but myself shall ever use this knife," said he.
+
+He had no pockets, but he tucked it away in his armpit, clamped the
+muscles down over it, and apparently forgot it. At least he gave it no
+further attention, used his hands as usual, but retained it as securely
+as in a pocket.
+
+"To-morrow," he promised at parting, "very early in the morning, I will
+send my own son and another man to guide you; and I will send a sheep
+for your meat."
+
+We arose "very early," packed our few affairs, picked out four
+porters--and sat down to wait. Our plan was to cruise for five days with
+as light and mobile an outfit as possible, and then to return for fresh
+supplies. Billy would take charge of the main camp during our absence.
+As advisers, we left her Abba Ali, Memba Sasa, and Mohammed.
+
+At noon we were still waiting. The possibility of doing a full day's
+journey was gone, but we thought we might at least make a start. At one
+o'clock, just as we had about given up hope, the Masai strolled in. They
+were beautiful, tall, straight youths, finely formed, with proud
+features and a most graceful carriage. In colour they were as though
+made of copper bronze, with the same glitter of high lights from their
+fine-textured skins. Even in this chilly climate they were nearly naked.
+One carried a spear, the other a bow and arrow.
+
+Joyously we uprose--and sat down again. We had provided an excellent
+supply of provisions for our guides; but on looking over the lot they
+discovered nothing--absolutely nothing--that met their ideas.
+
+"What _do_ they want?" we asked Leyeye in despair.
+
+"They say they will eat nothing but sheep," he reported.
+
+We remembered old Naiokotuku's promise of sending us sheep, sneered
+cynically at the faith of savages, and grimly set forth to see what we
+could buy in the surrounding country. But we wronged the old man. Less
+than a mile from camp we met men driving in as presents not one, but
+_two_ sheep. So we abandoned our shopping tour and returned to camp. By
+the time one of the sheep had been made into mutton it was too late to
+start. The Masai showed symptoms of desiring to go back to the village
+for the night. This did not please us. We called them up, and began
+extravagantly to admire their weapons, begging to examine them. Once we
+had them in our hands we craftily discoursed as follows:--
+
+"These are beautiful weapons, the most beautiful we have ever seen.
+Since you are going so spend the night in our camp, and since we greatly
+fear that some of our men might steal these beautiful weapons, we will
+ourselves guard them for you carefully from theft until morning."
+
+So saying, we deposited them inside the tent. Then we knew we had our
+Masai safe. They would never dream of leaving while the most cherished
+of their possessions were in hostage.
+
+
+
+
+XLII.
+
+SCOUTING IN THE ELEPHANT FOREST.
+
+
+Here we were finally off at dawn. It was a very chilly, wet dawn, with
+the fog so thick that we could see not over ten feet ahead. We had four
+porters, carrying about twenty-five pounds apiece of the bare
+necessities, Kongoni, and Leyeye. The Masai struck confidently enough
+through the mist. We crossed neck-deep grass flats--where we were
+thoroughly soaked--climbed hills through a forest, skirted apparently
+for miles an immense reed swamp. As usual when travelling strange
+country in a fog, we experienced that queer feeling of remaining in the
+same spot while fragments of near-by things are slowly paraded by. When
+at length the sun's power cleared the mists, we found ourselves in the
+middle of a forest country of high hills.
+
+Into this forest we now plunged, threading our way here and there where
+the animal trails would take us, looking always for fresh elephant
+spoor. It would have been quite impossible to have moved about in any
+other fashion. The timber grew on hillsides, and was very lofty and
+impressive; and the tropical undergrowth grew tall, rank, and
+impenetrable. We could proceed only by means of the kind assistance of
+the elephant, the buffalo, and the rhinoceros.
+
+Elephant spoor we found, but none made later than three weeks before.
+The trails were broad, solid paths through the forest, as ancient and
+beaten as though they had been in continuous use for years. Unlike the
+rhino and buffalo trails, they gave us head room and to spare. The great
+creatures had by sheer might cut their way through the dense, tough
+growth, leaving twisted, splintered, wrecked jungle behind them, but no
+impediment.
+
+By means of these beautiful trails we went quietly, penetrating farther
+and farther into the jungle. Our little procession of ten made no noise.
+If we should strike fresh elephant tracks, thus would we hunt them, with
+all our worldly goods at our backs, so that at night we could camp right
+on the trail.
+
+The day passed almost without incident.
+
+Once a wild crash and a snort told of a rhinoceros, invisible, but very
+close. We huddled together, our rifles ready, uncertain whether or not
+the animal would burst from the leafy screen at our very faces. The
+Masai stood side by side, the long spear poised, the bow bent, fine,
+tense figures in bronze.
+
+Near sundown we found ourselves by a swift little stream in the bottom
+of a deep ravine. Here we left the men to make camp, and ourselves
+climbed a big mountain on the other side. It gave us a look abroad over
+a wilderness of hills, forested heavily, and a glimpse of the landfall
+far away where no white man had ever been. This was as far south as we
+were destined to get, though at the time we did not know it. Our plan
+was to push on two days more. Near the top of the ridge we found the
+unmistakable tracks of the bongo. This is interesting to zoologists in
+that it extends the southward range of this rare and shy beast.
+
+Just at dark we regained our camp. It was built California fashion--for
+the first and last time in Africa: blankets spread on canvas under the
+open sky and a gipsy fire at our feet, over which I myself cooked our
+very simple meal. As we were smoking our pipes in sleepy content,
+Leyeye and the two Masai appeared for a shauri. Said the Masai,--
+
+"We have taken you over the country we know. There are elephants there
+sometimes, but there are no elephants there now. We can take you
+farther, and if you wish us to do so, we will do so; but we know no more
+of the country than you do. But now if we return to the manyatta
+to-morrow, we can march two hours to where are some Wanderobo; and the
+Wanderobo know this country and will take you through it. If it pleases
+you, one of us will go get the Wanderobo, and the other will stay with
+you to show good faith."
+
+We rolled our eyes at each other in humorous despair. Here at the very
+beginning of the reconnaissance we had run against the stone wall of
+African indirectness and procrastination. And just as we thought we had
+at last settled everything!
+
+"Why," we inquired, "were not the Wanderobo sent at first, instead of
+yourselves?"
+
+"Because," they replied, with truly engaging frankness, "our chief,
+Naiokotuku, thought that perhaps we might find elephant here in the
+country we know; and then we should get for ourselves all the presents
+you would give for finding elephant. But the elephant are not here now,
+so the Wanderobo will get part of the present."
+
+That was certainly candid. After some further talk we decided there was
+no help for it; we must return to camp for a new start.
+
+At this decision the Masai brightened. They volunteered to set off early
+with Leyeye, to push ahead of us rapidly, and to have the Wanderobo in
+camp by the time we reached there. We concealed somewhat cynical smiles,
+and agreed.
+
+The early start was made, but when we reached camp we found, not the
+Wanderobo, but Leyeye and the Masai huddled over a fire. This was
+exasperating, but we could not say much. After all, the whole matter was
+no right of ours, but a manifestation of friendship on the part of
+Naiokotuku. In the early afternoon the sky cleared, and the ambassadors
+departed, promising faithfully to be back before we slept. We spent the
+day writing and in gazing at the vivid view of the hillside, the forest,
+and the distant miniature prospect before us. Finally we discovered what
+made it in essence so strangely familiar. In vividness and clarity--even
+in the crudity of its tones--it was exactly like a coloured photograph!
+
+Of course the savages did not return that evening, nor did we really
+expect them. Just as a matter of form we packed up the next morning, and
+sat down to wait. Shortly before noon Leyeye and the Masai returned,
+bringing with them two of the strange, shy, forest hunters.
+
+But by this time we had talked things over thoroughly. The lure of the
+greater kudu was regaining the strength it had lost by a long series of
+disappointments. We had not time left for both a thorough investigation
+of the forests and a raid in the dry hills of the west after kudu.
+Mavrouki said he knew of a place where that animal ranged. So we had
+come to a decision.
+
+We called the Masai and Wanderobo before us. They squatted in a row,
+their spears planted before them. We sat in canvas chairs. Leyeye
+standing, translated. The affair was naturally of the greatest
+deliberation. In the indirect African manner we began our shauri.
+
+We asked one simple question at a time, dealing with one simple phase of
+the subject. This phase we treated from several different points of
+view, in order to be absolutely certain that it was understood. To these
+questions we received replies in this manner:--
+
+"Yes, the Wanderobo told us," they knew the forest; they knew how to go
+about in the forest; they understood how to find their way in the
+forest. They knew the elephant; they had seen the elephant many times in
+the forest; they knew where the elephant ranged in the forest--and so on
+through every piece of information we desired. It is the usual and only
+sure way of questioning natives.
+
+Thus we learned that the elephant range extended south through the
+forests for about seven days' travel; that at this time of year the
+beasts might be anywhere on that range. This confirmed our decision.
+Then said we to Leyeye:--
+
+"Tell the Masai that the bwana m'kubwa is most pleased with them, and
+that he is pleased with the way they have worked for him, and that he is
+pleased with the presents they have brought him. Tell them that he has
+no goods here with him, but that he has sent men back to the boma of
+bwana Kingozi[28] for blankets and wire and cloth, and when those men
+return he will make a good present to these Masai and to Naiokotuku,
+their chief.
+
+"Tell the Wanderobo that the bwana m'kubwa is pleased with them, and
+that he thanks them for coming so far to tell him of the elephant, and
+that he believes they have told him the truth. Tell them the bwana
+m'kubwa will not fight the elephant now, because he has not the time,
+but must go to attend to his affairs. But later, when two years have
+gone, he will make another safari, and will come back to this country,
+and will again ask these men to lead him out where he can fight the
+elephant. And in the meantime he will give them rupees with which to pay
+their hut tax to the Government."
+
+After various compliments the sitting rose. Then we packed up for a few
+hours' march. In a short time we passed the chief's village. He came out
+to say good-bye. A copper bronze youth accompanied him, lithe as a
+leopard.
+
+"My men have told me your words," said he. "I live always in these
+mountains, and my young men will bring me word when you return. I am
+glad the white men have come to see me. I shall have the Wanderobo ready
+to take you to fight the elephant when you return."
+
+He then instructed the young man to accompany us for the purpose of
+bringing back the presents we had promised. We shook hands in farewell,
+and so parted from this friendly and powerful chief.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[28] V.'s native name--the Master with the Red Beard.
+
+
+
+
+XLIII.
+
+THE TOPI CAMP.
+
+
+At the next camp we stayed for nearly a week.
+
+The country was charming. Mountains surrounded the long ellipse, near
+one edge of which we had pitched our tents. The ellipse was some ten
+miles long by four or five wide, and its surface rolled in easy billows
+to a narrow neck at the lower end. There we could just make out in the
+far distance a conical hill partly closing the neck. Atop the hill was a
+Masai manyatta, very tiny, with indistinct crawling red and brown
+blotches that meant cattle and sheep. Beyond the hill, and through the
+opening in the ellipse, we could see to another new country of hills and
+meadows and forest groves. In this clear air they were microscopically
+distinct. No blue of atmosphere nor shimmer of heat blurred their
+outlines. They were merely made small.
+
+Our camp was made in the open above a tiny stream. We saw wonderful
+sunrises and sunsets, and always spread out before us was the sweep of
+our plains and the unbroken ramparts that hemmed us in. From these
+mountains meandered small stream-ways marked by narrow strips of trees
+and brush, but the most of the valley was of high green grass.
+Occasional ant hills ten feet tall rose conical from the earth; and the
+country was pleasingly broken and modelled, so that one continually
+surmounted knolls, low, round ridges, and the like. Of such conditions
+are surprises made.
+
+The elevation here was some 7,000 feet, so that the nights were cold and
+the days not too warm. Our men did not fancy this change of weather. A
+good many of them came down with the fever always latent in their
+systems, and others suffered from bronchial colds.
+
+At one time we had down sick eleven men out of our slender total.
+However, I believe, in spite of these surface symptoms, that the cold
+air did them good. It certainly improved our own appetites and staying
+power.
+
+In the thirty or forty square miles of our valley were many herds of
+varied game. We here for the first time found Neuman's hartebeeste. The
+type at Narossara, and even in Lengetto, was the common Coke's
+hartebeeste, so that between these closely allied species there
+interposes at this point only the barriers of a climb and a forest.
+These animals and the zebra were the most plentiful of the game. The
+zebra were brilliantly white and black, with magnificent coats.
+Thompson's and Roberts' gazelles were here in considerable numbers,
+eland, Roosevelt's wildebeeste, giraffe, the smaller grass antelopes,
+and a fair number of topi. In the hills we saw buffalo sign, several
+cheetah, and heard many lions.
+
+It had been our first plan that C. should return immediately to V.'s
+boma after supplies, but in view of the abundance of game we decided to
+wait over a day. We much desired to get four topi, and this seemed a
+good chance to carry some of them out. Also we wished to decide for
+certain whether or not the hartebeeste here was really of the Neuman
+variety.
+
+We had great luck. Over the very first hill from camp we came upon a
+herd of about a dozen topi, feeding on a hill across the way. I knocked
+down the first one standing at just 250 paces. The herd then split and
+broke to right and left. By shooting very carefully and steadily I
+managed to kill three more before they were out of range. The last shot
+was at 325 paces. In all I fired seven shots, and hit six times. This
+was the best shooting I did in Africa--or anywhere else--and is a
+first-rate argument for the Springfield and the high velocity,
+sharp-pointed bullet.
+
+Overjoyed at our luck in collecting these animals so promptly, so near
+camp, and at a time so very propitious for handling the trophies, we set
+to the job of skinning and cutting up. The able-bodied men all came out
+from camp to carry in the meat. They appeared, grinning broadly, for
+they had had no meat since leaving the Narossara. C. and I saw matters
+well under way, and then went on to where I had seen a cheetah the day
+before. Hardly were we out of sight when two lions sauntered over the
+hill and proceeded to appropriate the meat! The two men in charge
+promptly withdrew. A moment later a dozen porters on their way out from
+camp topped the hill and began to yell at the lions. The latter then
+slowly and reluctantly retreated.
+
+We were very sorry we had not stayed. The valley seemed populated with
+lions, but in general they were, for some reason, strictly nocturnal.
+By day they inhabited the fastnesses of the mountain ranges. We never
+succeeded in tracing them in that large and labyrinthine country; nor at
+any time could we induce them to come to kills. Either their natural
+prey was so abundant that they did not fancy ready-killed food; or, what
+is more likely, the cold nights prevented the odour of the carcasses
+from carrying far. We heard lions every night; and every morning we
+conscientiously turned out before daybreak to crawl up to our bait
+through the wet, cold grass, but with no results. That very night we
+were jerked from a sound sleep by a tremendous roar almost in camp. So
+close was it that it seemed to each of us but just outside the tent. We
+came up all standing. The lion, apparently, was content with that
+practical joke, for he moved off quietly. Next morning we found where
+the tracks had led down to water, not ten yards away.
+
+We spent the rest of that day spying on the game herds. It is
+fascinating work, to lie belly down on a tall ant hill, glasses steadied
+by elbows, picking out the individual animals and discussing them
+low-voiced with a good companion. C. and I looked over several hundred
+hartebeeste, trying to decide their identity. We were neither of us
+familiar with the animal, and had only recollections of the book
+distinctions. Finally I picked out one that seemed to present the most
+marked characteristics--and missed him clean at 280 yards. Then I took
+three shots at 180 yards to down a second choice. The poor shooting was
+forgotten, however, in our determination that this was indeed Neumanii.
+
+A vain hunt for lions occupied all the next day. The third morning C.
+started for the boma, leaving Billy and me to look about us as we
+willed. Shortly after he had departed a delegation of Masai came in,
+dressed in their best, and bearing presents of milk. Leyeye was summoned
+as interpreter.
+
+The Masai informed us that last night a lion had leapt the thorn walls
+of their boma, had pressed on through the fires, had seized a
+two-year-old steer, and had dragged the beast outside. Then the pursuit
+with spears and firebrands had become too hot for him, so that he had
+dropped his victim and retired. They desired (_a_) medicine for the
+steer, (_b_) magic to keep that lion away, (_c_) that I should assist
+them in hunting the lion down.
+
+I questioned them closely, and soon discovered both that the lion must
+have been very bold, and also that he had received a pretty lively
+reception. Magic to keep him away seemed like a safe enough proposition,
+for the chances were he would keep himself away.
+
+Therefore I filled a quart measure with clear water, passed my hand
+across its untroubled surface--and lo! it turned a clear bright pink!
+
+Long-drawn exclamations of "Eigh! Eigh!" greeted this magic, performed
+by means of permanganate crystals held between the fingers.
+
+"With this bathe the wounds of your steer. Then sprinkle the remainder
+over your cattle. The lion will not return," said I. Then reflecting
+that I was to be some time in the country, and that the lion might get
+over his scare, I added, "The power of this magic is three days."
+
+They departed very much impressed. A little later Memba Sasa and I
+followed them. The manyatta was most picturesquely placed atop the
+conical hill at the foot of the valley. From its elevation we could see
+here and there in the distance the variegated blotches of red and white
+and black that represented the cattle herds. Innumerable flocks of sheep
+and goats, under charge of the small boys and youths, fed nearer at
+hand. The low smooth-plastered huts, with their abattis of thorn bush
+between, crowned the peak like a chaplet. Outside it sat a number of
+elders sunning themselves, and several smiling, good-natured young
+women, probably the spoiled darlings of these plutocrats. One of these
+damsels spake Swahili, so we managed to exchange compliments. They told
+us exactly when and how the lion had gone. Three nimble old gentlemen
+accompanied us when we left. They were armed with spears; and they
+displayed the most extraordinary activity, skipping here and there
+across the ravines and through the brush, casting huge stones into
+likely cover, and generally making themselves ubiquitous. However, we
+did not come up with the lion.
+
+In our clinic that evening appeared one of the men claiming to suffer
+from rheumatism. I suspected him, and still suspect him, of malingering
+in advance in order to get out of the hard work we must soon undertake,
+but had no means of proving my suspicion. However, I decided to
+administer asperin. We possessed only the powdered form of the drug. I
+dumped about five grains on his tongue, and was about to proffer him the
+water with which to wash it down--when he inhaled sharply! I do not know
+the precise effect of asperin in the windpipe, but it is not pleasant.
+The boy thought himself bewitched. His eyes stuck out of his head; he
+gasped painfully; he sank to the ground; he made desperate efforts to
+bolt out into the brush. By main strength we restrained him, and forced
+him to swallow the water. Little by little he recovered. Next night I
+missed him from the clinic, and sent Abba Ali in search. The man assured
+Abba Ali most vehemently that the medicine was wonderful, that every
+trace of rheumatism had departed, that he never felt better in his life,
+and that (important point) he was perfectly able to carry a load on the
+morrow.
+
+
+
+
+XLIV.
+
+THE UNKNOWN LAND.
+
+
+C. returned the next day from V.'s boma, bringing more potio and some
+trade goods. We sent a good present back to Naiokotuku, and prepared for
+an early start into the new country.
+
+We marched out of the lower end of our elliptical valley towards the
+miniature landscape we had seen through the opening. But before we
+reached it we climbed sharp to the right around the end of the
+mountains, made our way through a low pass, and so found ourselves in a
+new country entirely. The smooth, undulating green-grass plains were now
+superseded by lava expanses grown with low bushes. It was almost exactly
+like the sage-brush deserts of Arizona and New Mexico--the same coarse
+sand and lava footing, the same deeply eroded barrancas, the same
+scattered round bushes dotted evenly over the scene. We saw here very
+little game. Across the way lay another range of low mountains clothed
+darkly with dull green, like the chaparral-covered coast ranges of
+California. In one place was a gunsight pass through which we could see
+other distant blue mountains. We crossed the arid plain and toiled up
+through the notch pass.
+
+The latter made very difficult footing indeed, for the entire surface of
+the ground was covered with smooth, slippery boulders and rocks of iron
+and quartz. What had so smoothed them I do not know, for they seemed to
+be ill-placed for water erosion. The boys with their packs atop found
+this hard going, and we ourselves slipped and slid and bumped in spite
+of our caution.
+
+Once through the pass we found ourselves overlooking a wide prospect of
+undulating thorn scrub from which rose occasional bushy hills, solitary
+buttes, and bold cliffs. It was a thick-looking country to make a way
+through.
+
+Nevertheless somewhere here dwelt the Kudu, so in we plunged. The rest
+of the day--and of days to follow--we spent in picking a way through the
+thorn scrub and over loose rocks and shifting stones. A stream bed
+contained an occasional water hole. Tall aloes were ablaze with red
+flowers. The country looked arid, the air felt dry, the atmosphere was
+so clear that a day's journey seemed--usually--but the matter of a few
+hours. Only rarely did we enjoy a few moments of open travel. Most of
+the time the thorns caught at us. In the mountain passes were sometimes
+broad trails of game or of the Masai cattle. The country was harsh and
+dry and beautiful with the grays and dull greens of arid-land brush, or
+with the soft atmospheric tints of arid-land distances. Game was fairly
+common, but rather difficult to find. There were many buffalo, a very
+few zebra, leopards, hyenas, plenty of impalla, some sing-sing, a few
+eland, abundant wart-hog, Thompson's gazelle, and duiker. We never
+lacked for meat when we dared shoot it, but we were after nobler game.
+The sheep given us by Naiokotuku followed along under charge of the
+syces.
+
+When we should run quite out of meat, we intended to eat them. We
+delayed too long, however. One evening the fool boy tied them to a thorn
+bush; one of them pulled back, the thorns bit, and both broke loose and
+departed into the darkness. Of course everybody pursued, but we could
+not recapture them. Ten minutes later the hyenas broke into the most
+unholy laughter. We could not blame them; the joke was certainly on us.
+
+In passing, the cachinnations of the laughing hyena are rather a series
+of high-voiced self-conscious titters than laughter. They sound like the
+stage idea of a lot of silly and rather embarrassed old maids who have
+been accused by some rude man of "taking notice." This call is rarely
+used; indeed, I never heard it but the once. The usual note is a sort of
+moaning howl, impossible to describe, but easy to recognize.
+
+Thus we penetrated gradually deeper and deeper into this wild country;
+through low mountains, over bush-clad plains, into thorn jungles, down
+wide valleys, over hill-divided plateaus. Late in the afternoon we would
+make camp. Sometimes we had good water; more often not. In the evening
+the throb of distant drums and snatches of intermittent wailing song
+rose and fell with the little night breezes.
+
+
+
+
+XLV.
+
+THE ROAN.
+
+
+Our last camp, before turning back, we pitched about two o'clock one
+afternoon. Up to this time we had marched steadily down wide valleys,
+around the end of mountain ranges, moving from one room to the other of
+this hill-divided plateau. At last we ended on a slope that descended
+gently to water. It was grown sparingly with thorn trees, among which we
+raised our tents. Over against us, and across several low swells of
+grass and scrub-grown hills, was a range of mountains. Here, Mavrouki
+claimed, dwelt roan antelope.
+
+We settled down quite happily. The country round about was full of game;
+the weather was cool, the wide sweeps of country, the upward fling of
+mountains and buttes were much like some parts of our great West. Almost
+every evening the thunderstorms made gorgeous piled effects in the
+distance. At night the lions and hyenas roared or howled, and some of
+the tiny fever owls impudently answered them back.
+
+Various adventures came our way, some of which have been elsewhere
+narrated. Here we killed the very big buffalo that nearly got Billy.[29]
+In addition, we collected two more specimens of the Neuman's
+hartebeeste, and two Chanler's reed buck.
+
+But Mavrouki's glowing predictions as to roan were hardly borne out by
+facts. According to him the mountains simply swarmed with them--he had
+seen thirty-five in one day, etc. Of course we had discounted this, but
+some old tracks had to a certain extent borne out his statement.
+
+Lunch time one day, however, found us on top of the highest ridge. Here
+we hunted up a bit of shade, and spent two hours out of the noon sun.
+While we lay there the sky slowly overcast, so that when we aroused
+ourselves to go on, the dazzling light had softened. As time was getting
+short, we decided to separate. Memba Sasa and Mavrouki were to go in one
+direction, while C., Kongoni and I took the other.
+
+Before we started I remarked that I was offering two rupees for the
+capture of a roan.
+
+We had not gone ten minutes when Kongoni turned his head cautiously and
+grinned back at us.
+
+"My rupees," said he.
+
+A fine buck roan stood motionless beneath a tree in the valley below us.
+He was on the other side of the stream jungle, and nearly a mile away.
+While we watched him, he lay down.
+
+Our task now was to gain the shelter of the stream jungle below without
+being seen, to slip along it until opposite the roan, and then to
+penetrate the jungle near enough to get a shot. The first part of this
+contract seemed to us the most difficult, for we were forced to descend
+the face of the hill, like flies crawling down a blackboard, plain for
+him to see.
+
+We slid cautiously from bush to bush; we moved by imperceptible inches
+across the numerous open spaces. About half-way down we were arrested by
+a violent snort ahead. Fifteen or twenty zebras nooning in the brush
+where no zebras were supposed to be, clattered down the hill like an
+avalanche. We froze where we were. The beasts ran fifty yards, then
+wheeled, and started back up the hill, trying to make us out. For twenty
+minutes all parties to the transaction remained stock still, the zebras
+staring, we hoping fervently they would decide to go down the valley and
+not up it, the roan dozing under his distant tree.
+
+By luck our hopes were fulfilled. The zebra turned downstream, walking
+sedately away in single file. When we were certain they had all quite
+gone, we resumed our painful descent.
+
+At length we dropped below the screen of trees, and could stand upright
+and straighten the kinks out of our backs. But now a new complication
+arose. The wind, which had been the very basis of our calculations,
+commenced to chop and veer. Here it blew from one quarter, up there on
+the side hill from another, and through the bushes in quite another
+direction still. Then without warning they would all shift about. We
+watched the tops of the grasses through our binoculars, hoping to read
+some logic into the condition. It was now four o'clock--our stalk had
+thus far consumed two hours--and the roan must soon begin to feed. If we
+were going to do anything, we must do it soon.
+
+Therefore we crept through a very spiky, noisy jungle to its other edge,
+sneaked along the edge until we could make out the tree, and raised
+ourselves for a look. Through the glass I could just make out the
+roan's face stripe. He was still there!
+
+Quite encouraged, I instantly dropped down and crawled to within range.
+When again I raised my head the roan had disappeared. One of these
+aggravating little side puffs of breeze had destroyed our two hours'
+work.
+
+The outlook was not particularly encouraging. We had no means of telling
+how far the animal would go, nor into what sort of country; and the hour
+was well advanced toward sunset. However, we took up the track, and
+proceeded to follow it as well as we could. That was not easy, for the
+ground was hard and stony. Suddenly C. threw himself flat. Of course we
+followed his example. To us he whispered that he thought he had caught a
+glimpse of the animal through an opening and across the stream bed. We
+stalked carefully, and found ourselves in the middle of a small herd of
+topis, one of which, half concealed in the brush, had deceived C. This
+consumed valuable time. When again we had picked up the spoor, it was
+agreed that I was to still-hunt ahead as rapidly as I could, while C.
+and Kongoni would puzzle out the tracks as far as possible before dark.
+
+Therefore I climbed the little rocky ridge on our left, and walked
+along near its crest, keeping a sharp lookout over the valley
+below--much as one would hunt August bucks in California. After two or
+three hundred yards I chanced on a short strip of soft earth in which
+the fresh tracks of the roan going uphill were clearly imprinted. I
+could not without making too much noise inform the others that I had cut
+in ahead of them; so I followed the tracks as cautiously and quietly as
+I could. On the very top of the hill the roan leapt from cover fifty
+yards away, and with a clatter of rocks dashed off down the ridge. The
+grass was very high, and I could see only his head and horns, but I
+dropped the front sight six inches and let drive at a guess. The guess
+happened to be a good one, for he turned a somersault seventy-two yards
+away.
+
+C. and Kongoni came up. The sun had just set. In fifteen minutes it
+would be pitch dark. We dispatched Kongoni for help and lanterns, and
+turned to on the job of building a signal fire and skinning the trophy.
+
+The reason for our strangely chopping wind now became apparent. From our
+elevation we could see piled thunder-clouds looming up from the west.
+They were spreading upward and outward in the swift, rushing manner of
+tropic storms; and I saw I must hustle if I was to get my fire going at
+all. The first little blaze was easy, and after that I had to pile on
+quantities of any wood I could lay my hands to. The deluge blotted out
+every vestige of daylight and nearly drowned out my fire. I had started
+to help C. with the roan, but soon found that I had my own job cut out
+for me, and so went back to nursing my blaze. The water descended in
+sheets. We were immediately soaked through, and very cold. The surface
+of the ground was steep and covered with loose round rocks, and in my
+continuous trips for firewood I stumbled and slipped and ran into thorns
+miserably.[30]
+
+After a long interval of this the lanterns came bobbing through the
+darkness, and a few moments later the dim light revealed the shining
+rain-soaked faces of our men.
+
+We wasted no time in the distribution of burdens. C. with one of the
+lanterns brought up the rear, while I with the other went on ahead.
+
+Now as Kongoni had but this minute completed the round trip to camp, we
+concluded that he would be the best one to give us a lead. This was a
+mistake. He took us out of the hills well enough, and a good job that
+was, for we could not see the length of our arms into the thick, rainy
+blackness, and we had to go entirely by the slants of the country. But
+once in the more open, sloping country, with its innumerable bushy or
+wooded ravines, he began to stray. I felt this from the first; but
+Kongoni insisted strongly he was right, and in the rain and darkness we
+had no way of proving him wrong. In fact I had no reason for thinking
+him wrong; I only felt it. This sense of direction is apparently a fifth
+wheel or extra adjustment some people happen to possess. It has nothing
+to do with acquired knowledge, as is very well proved by the fact that
+in my own case it acts only as long as I do not think about it. As soon
+as I begin consciously to consider the matter I am likely to go wrong.
+Thus many, many times I have back-tracked in the dark over ground I had
+traversed but once before, and have caught myself turning out for bushes
+or trees I could not see, but which my subconscious memory recalled.
+This would happen only when I would think of something besides the way
+home. As soon as I took charge, I groped as badly as the next man. It is
+a curious and sometimes valuable extra, but by no means to be depended
+upon.
+
+Now, however, as I was following Kongoni, this faculty had full play,
+and it assured me vehemently that we were wrong. I called C. up from the
+rear for consultation. Kongoni was very positive he was right; but as we
+had now been walking over an hour, and camp should not have been more
+than three miles from where we had killed the roan, we were inclined
+towards my instinct. So we took the compass direction, in order to
+assure consistency at least, and struck off at full right angles to the
+left.
+
+So we tramped for a long time. Every few moments Kongoni would want
+another look at that compass. It happened that we were now going due
+north, and his notion was that the needle pointed the way to camp. We
+profoundly hoped that his faith in white man's magic would not be
+shattered. At the end of an hour the rain let up, and it cleared
+sufficiently to disclose some of the mountain outlines. They convinced
+us that we were in the main right; though just where, to the north, camp
+now lay was beyond our power to determine. Kongoni's detour had been
+rather indeterminate in direction and distance.
+
+The country now became very rough, in a small way. The feeble light of
+our leading lantern revealed only ghosts and phantoms and looming,
+warning suggestions of things which the shadows confused and shifted.
+Heavily laden men would have found it difficult travelling by prosaic
+daylight; but now, with the added impossibility of picking a route
+ahead, we found ourselves in all sorts of trouble. Many times we had to
+back out and try again. The ghostly flickering tree shapes against the
+fathomless black offered us apparently endless aisles that nevertheless
+closed before us like the doors of a trap when we attempted to enter
+them.
+
+We kept doggedly to the same general northerly direction. When you are
+lost, nothing is more foolish than to make up your mind hastily and
+without due reflection; and nothing is more foolish than to change your
+mind once you have made it up. That way vacillation, confusion, and
+disaster lie. Should you decide, after due consideration of all the
+elements of the problem, that you should go east, then east you go, and
+nothing must turn you. You may get to the Atlantic Ocean if nothing
+else. And if you begin to modify your original plan, then you begin to
+circle. Believe me; I know.
+
+Kongoni was plainly sceptical, and said so until I shut him up with
+some rather peremptory sarcasm. The bearers, who had to stumble in the
+dark under heavy burdens, were good-natured and joking. This we
+appreciated. One can never tell whether or not he is popular with a
+native until he and the native are caught in a dangerous or disagreeable
+fix.
+
+We walked two hours as in a treadmill. Then that invaluable though
+erratic sixth sense of mine awoke. I stopped short.
+
+"I believe we've come far enough," I shouted back to C., and fired my
+rifle.
+
+We received an almost immediate answer from a short distance to the
+left. Not over two hundred yards in that direction we met our camp men
+bearing torches, and so were escorted in triumph after a sixteen-hour
+day.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[29] "The Land of Footprints."
+
+[30] Six months after I had reached home, one of these thorns worked its
+way out of the calf of my leg.
+
+
+
+
+XLVI.
+
+THE GREATER KUDU.
+
+
+Next morning, in a joking manner, I tried to impress Kongoni with a
+sense of delinquency in not knowing better his directions, especially as
+he had twice traversed the route. He declined to be impressed.
+
+"It is not the business of man to walk at night," he replied with
+dignity.
+
+And when you stop to think of it, it certainly is not--in Africa.
+
+At this camp we lingered several days. The great prize of our journeying
+was still lacking, and, to tell the truth, we had about given up hope,
+if not our efforts. Almost we had begun to believe our friends in
+Nairobi who had scoffed at the uselessness of our quest. Always we
+conscientiously looked over good kudu country, hundreds of miles of it,
+and always with the same lack of result, or even of encouragement. Other
+game we saw in plenty, of a dozen different varieties, large and small;
+but our five weeks' search had thus far yielded us only the sight of the
+same old, old sign, made many months before. If you had stood with us
+atop one of the mountains, and with us had looked abroad on the
+countless leagues of rolling brush-clothed land, undulating away in all
+directions over a far horizon, you must with us have estimated as very
+slight the chances of happening on the exact pin point where the kudu at
+that moment happened to be feeding. For the beast is shy, it inhabits
+the densest, closest mountain cover, it possesses the keen eyesight and
+sense of smell of the bush-dwelling deer and antelope, and more than the
+average sense of hearing. There are very few of him. But the chief
+discouragement is that arising from his roaming tendencies. Other rare
+animals are apt to "use" about one locality, so that once the hunter
+finds tracks, new or old, his game is one of patient, skilful search.
+The greater kudu, however, seems in this country at least to be a
+wanderer. He is here to-day and gone to-morrow. Systematic search seems
+as foolish as in the case of the proverbial needle in the haystack. The
+only method is to sift constantly, and trust to luck. One cannot catch
+fish with the fly in the book, but one has at least a chance if one
+keeps it on the water.
+
+Mavrouki was the only one among us who had the living faith that comes
+from having seen the animal in the flesh. That is a curious bit of
+hunter psychology. When a man is out after a species new to him, it is
+only by the utmost stretch of the imagination that he is able to realize
+that such an animal can exist at all. He cannot prefigure it, somehow.
+He generally exaggerates to himself the difficulty of making it out, of
+approaching it, of getting his shot; until at last, if he happens to
+have hunted some time in vain, the beast becomes almost mythical and
+unbelievable. Once he has seen the animal, whether he gets a shot or
+not, all this vanishes. The strain on faith relaxes. He knows what to
+look for, and what to expect; and even if he sees no other specimen for
+a month, he nevertheless goes about the business with a certain
+confidence.
+
+One afternoon we had been hunting carefully certain low mountains, and
+were headed for camp, walking rather carelessly along the bed of a
+narrow, open valley below the bush-covered side hills. The sun had
+disappeared behind the ranges, and the dusk of evening was just
+beginning to rise like a mist from the deeps of the canons. We had
+ceased hunting--it was time to hurry home--and happened not to be
+talking only because we were tired. By sheerest idle luck I chanced to
+look up to the densely covered face of the mountain. Across a single
+tiny opening in the tall brush five or six hundred yards away, I caught
+a movement. Still idly I lifted my glasses for a look at what I thought
+would prove the usual impalla or sing-sing, and was just in time to
+catch the spirals of a magnificent set of horns. It was the greater kudu
+at last!
+
+I gave a little cluck of caution; and instantly, without question, after
+the African fashion, the three men ahead of me sank to the ground. C.
+looked at me inquiringly. I motioned with my eyes. He raised his glasses
+for one look.
+
+"That's the fellow," he said quietly.
+
+The kudu, as though he had merely stepped into the opening to give us a
+sight of him, melted into the brush.
+
+It was magnificent and exciting to have seen this wonderful beast after
+so long a quest, but by the same token it was not very encouraging for
+all that. If we had had all the daylight we needed, and unlimited time,
+it would have been quite a feat to stalk the wary beast in that thick,
+noisy cover. Now it was almost dark, and would be quite dark within the
+half-hour. The kudu had moved out of sight. Whether he had gone on some
+distance, or whether he still lingered near the edge of the tiny opening
+was another matter to be determined, and to be determined quickly.
+
+Leaving Kongoni and Mavrouki, C. and I wriggled pantingly up the hill,
+as fast and at the same time as cautiously as we could. At the edge of
+the opening we came to a halt, belly down, and began eagerly to
+scrutinize the brush across the way. If the kudu still lingered we had
+to find it out before we ventured out of cover to take up his trail.
+Inch by inch we scrutinized every possible concealment. Finally C.
+breathed sharp with satisfaction. He had caught sight of the tip of one
+horn. With some difficulty he indicated to me where. After staring long
+enough, we could dimly make out the kudu himself browsing, from the
+tender branch-ends.
+
+All we could do was to lie low. If the kudu fed on out of sight into the
+cover, we could not possibly get a shot; if he should happen again to
+cross the opening, we would get a good shot. No one but a hunter can
+understand the panting, dry-mouthed excitement of those minutes; five
+weeks' hard work hung in the balance. The kudu did neither of these
+things; he ceased browsing, took three steps forward, and stood.
+
+The game seemed blocked. The kudu had evidently settled down for a
+snooze; it was impossible, in the situation, to shorten the distance
+without being discovered; the daylight was almost gone; we could make
+out no trace of him except through our glasses. Look as hard as we
+could, we could see nothing with the naked eye. Unless something
+happened within the next two minutes, we would bring nothing into camp
+but the memory of a magnificent beast. And next day he would probably be
+inextricably lost in the wilderness of mountains.[31]
+
+It was a time for desperate measures, and, to C.'s evident doubtful
+anxiety, I took them. Through the glasses the mane of the kudu showed as
+a dim gray streak. Carefully I picked out two twigs on a bush fifteen
+feet from me, and a tuft of grass ten yards on, all of which were in
+line with where the shoulder of the kudu ought to be. Then I lowered my
+glasses. The gray streak of the kudu's mane had disappeared in the
+blending twilight, but I could still see the tips of the twigs and the
+tuft of grass. Very carefully I aligned the sights with these; and, with
+a silent prayer to the Red Gods, loosed the bullet into the darkness.
+
+At the crack of the rifle the kudu leapt into plain sight.
+
+"Hit!" rasped C. in great excitement.
+
+I did not wait to verify this, but fired four times more as fast as I
+could work the bolt. Three of the bullets told. At the last shot he
+crumpled and came rolling down the slope. We both raised a wild whoop of
+triumph, which was answered at once by the expectant gunbearers below.
+
+The finest trophy in Africa was ours!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[31] Trailing for any distance was impossible on account of the stony
+soil.
+
+
+
+
+XLVII.
+
+THE MAGIC PORTALS CLOSE.
+
+
+It seemed hopeless to try for a picture. Nevertheless I opened wide my
+lens, steadied the camera, and gave it a half-second. The result was
+fairly good. So much for a high grade lens. We sent Kongoni into camp
+for help, and ourselves proceeded to build up the usual fire for signal
+and for protection against wild beasts. Then we sat down to enjoy the
+evening, while Mavrouki skinned the kudu.
+
+We looked abroad over a wide stretch of country. Successive low ridges
+crossed our front, each of a different shade of slate gray from its
+neighbours, and a gray half-luminous mist filled the valley between
+them. The edge of the world was thrown sharp against burnished copper.
+After a time the moon rose.
+
+Memba Sasa arrived before the lanterns, out of breath, his face
+streaming with perspiration. Poor Memba Sasa! this was almost the only
+day he had not followed close at my heels, and on this day we had
+captured the Great Prize. No thought of that seemed to affect the
+heartiness of his joy. He rushed up to shake both my hands; he examined
+the kudu with an attention that was held only by great restraint; he let
+go that restrain to shake me again enthusiastically by the hands. After
+him, up the hill, bobbed slowly the lanterns. The smiling bearers
+shouldered the trophy and the meat, and we stumbled home through the
+half shadows and the opalescences of the moonlight.
+
+Our task in this part of the country was now finished. We set out on the
+return journey. The weather changed. A beautiful, bright-copper sunset
+was followed by a drizzle. By morning this had turned into a heavy rain.
+We left the topi camp, to which we had by now returned, cold and
+miserable. C. and I had contributed our waterproofs to protect the
+precious trophies, and we were speedily wet through. The grass was long.
+This was no warm and grateful tropical rain, but a driving, chilling
+storm straight out from the high mountains.
+
+We marched up the long plain, we turned to the left around the base of
+the ranges, we mounted the narrow grass valley, we entered the
+forest--the dark, dripping, and unfriendly forest. Over the edge we
+dropped and clambered down through the hanging vines and the sombre
+trees. By-and-by, we emerged on the open plains below, the plains on the
+hither side of the Narossara, the Africa we had known so long. The rain
+ceased. It was almost as though a magic portal had clicked after us.
+Behind it lay the wonderful secret upper country of the unknown.
+
+
+
+
+XLVIII.
+
+THE LAST TREK.
+
+
+Some weeks later we camped high on the slopes of Suswa, the great
+mountain of the Rift Valley, only one day's march from the railroad.
+After the capture of the kudu Africa still held for us various
+adventures--a buffalo, a go of fever, and the like--but the culmination
+had been reached. We had lingered until the latest moment, reluctant to
+go. Now in the gray dawn we were filing down the slopes of the mountains
+for the last trek. A low, flowing mist marked the distant Kedong; the
+flames of an African sunrise were revelling in the eastern skies. All
+our old friends seemed to be bidding us good-bye. Around the shoulder of
+the mountains a lion roared, rumble upon rumble. Two hyenas leapt from
+the grass, ran fifty yards, and turned to look at us.
+
+"Good-bye, simba! good-bye, fice!" we cried to them sadly.
+
+A little farther we saw zebra, and the hartebeeste, and the gazelles.
+One by one appeared and disappeared again the beasts with which we had
+grown so familiar during our long months in the jungle. So remarkable
+was the number of species that we both began to comment upon the fact,
+to greet the animals, to bid them farewell, as though they were
+reporting in order from the jungle to bid us God-speed. Half in earnest
+we waved our hands to them and shouted our greetings to them in the
+native--punda milia, kongoni, pa-a, fice, m'pofu, twiga, simba,
+n'grooui, and the rest. Before our eyes the misty ranges hardened and
+stiffened under the fierce sun. Our men marched steadily, cheerfully,
+beating their loads in rhythm with their safari sticks, crooning under
+their breaths, and occasionally breaking into full-voiced chant. They
+were glad to be back from the long safari, back from across the Thirst,
+from the high, cold country, from the dangers and discomforts of the
+unknown. We rode a little wistfully, for these great plains and
+mysterious jungles, these populous, dangerous, many-voiced nights, these
+flaming, splendid dawnings and day-falls, these fierce, shimmering noons
+we were to know no more.
+
+Two days we had in Nairobi before going to the coast. There we paid off
+and dismissed our men, giving them presents according to the length and
+faithfulness of their service. They took them and departed, eagerly, as
+was natural, to the families and the pleasures from which they had been
+so long separated. Mohammed said good-bye, and went, and was sorry;
+Kongoni departed, after many and sincere protestations; quiet little
+Mavrouki came back three times to shake hands again, and disappeared
+reluctantly--but disappeared; Leyeye went; Abba Ali followed the service
+of his master, C.; "Timothy" received his present--in which he was
+disappointed--and departed with salaams. Only Memba Sasa remained. I
+paid him for his long service, and I gave him many and rich presents,
+and bade farewell to him with genuine regret and affection.
+
+Memba Sasa had wives and a farm near town, neither of which possessions
+he had seen for a very long while. Nevertheless he made no move to see
+them. When our final interview had terminated with the usual "Bags" (It
+is finished), he shook hands once more and withdrew, but only to take
+his position across the street. There he squatted on his heels, fixed
+his eyes upon me, and remained. I went down town on business. Happening
+to glance through the office window I caught sight of Memba Sasa again
+across the street, squatted on his heels, his gaze fixed unwaveringly on
+my face. So it was for two days. When I tried to approach him, he glided
+away, so that I got no further speech with him; but always, quietly and
+unobtrusively, he returned to where he could see me plainly. He
+considered that our interview had terminated our official relations, but
+he wanted to see the last of the bwana with whom he had journeyed so
+far.
+
+One makes many acquaintances as one knocks about the world; and once in
+a great many moons one finds a friend--a man the mere fact of whose
+existence one is glad to realize, whether one ever sees him again or
+not. These are not many, and they are of various degree. Among them I am
+glad to number this fierce savage. He was efficient, self-respecting,
+brave, staunch, and loyal with a great loyalty. I do not think I can
+better end this book than by this feeble tribute to a man whose
+opportunities were not many, but whose soul was great.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+     BOOKS BY STEWART EDWARD WHITE.
+
+
+     "_Mr. Stewart Edward White is a Thomas Hardy, so to
+     speak, of the primeval forests of the Far West, and of the
+     great rivers that run out of them over the brink of evening.
+     His large, still novels will live on as a kind of social
+     history_."--_The Morning Post_.
+
+
+     THE LAND OF FOOTPRINTS  2s. net.
+
+     "The best book of travel in Africa that has been published for
+     many years."--_The Nottingham Daily Express_.
+
+     "It is more than a thrilling story of adventure, for Mr. White
+     shows that he is a man of broad sympathies and understanding, and
+     can not only deal successfully with primitive tribes, but really knows
+     them."--_Punch_.
+
+
+     THE CABIN               2s. net.
+
+     "'The Cabin' is a pure delight. We read of a husband and wife
+     camping out in a little shanty in the heart of a Californian
+     forest--that is all the story; but around it grows chapter after
+     chapter of      sagacity and fun and insight, and a deep joy in
+     beauty and living things. And all is given to us as simply and
+     sincerely as it was lived through and thought through."
+     --_The Nation_.
+
+
+     THE FOREST              1s. net.
+
+
+     RULES OF THE GAME       7d. net.
+
+
+     THE BLAZED TRAIL        7d. net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's African Camp Fires, by Stewart Edward White
+
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