112 NAIROBI AND MT. KENYA 



hyenas, tolerated by the Masai because they are the hving sepulchres 

 of their dead relations. When man, woman or child dies among the 

 Masai, agricultural or pastoral, the corpse is placed on the outskirts 

 of the settlement for the hyenas to devour at nights. The cry of the 

 hyena is not a laugh, as people make out, but a long-drawn falsetto 

 wail ending in a whoop. It sounds exactly like what one might imagine 

 to be the mocking cry of a ghoul ; and but for the fact that we now find 

 that the ghoul myth has a very solid human origin (since there are 

 depraved people all over Africa at the present day who have a mania 

 for eating corpse-flesh, and this trait may also have cropped out in pre- 

 Mohammedan days in Arabia and Persia), one might very well im- 

 agine that the idea of the ghoul arose from the hyena, as that of the 

 harpy probably did from the vulture. 



"All these people are alike in their love of blood as an article of 

 food. They periodically bleed their cattle and drink the blood hot, or 

 else mix it with porridge. The women of these tribes do not eat fowls, 

 and neither men nor women eat eggs. As among most negro races, 

 the men feed alone, and the women eat after the men have done. 



*'Honey is a most important article of diet of all the natives in 

 this region. In some districts they semi-domesticate the wild bees by 

 placing bark cylinders on trees for them to build in. From honey is 

 made an intoxicating mead. They also make a wine from the sap of 

 the wild date palm. Beer is made from the grain of eleusine and sor- 

 ghum. As a general rule fermented liquors are never drunk by the 

 young unmarried women or the young men. Both sexes and people 

 of all ages use tobacco in one form or another. The fighting men take 

 snuff, the old married men chew tobacco, and the old women smoke it. 

 The Lumbwa people make tobacco juice by keeping macerated tobacco 

 leaves soaked in water in a goat horn slung round the neck. Closing 

 one nostril with a finger, they tilt the head on one side, and then pour 

 the liquid tobacco juice out of the horn into the other nostril. Both 

 nostrils are then pinched for a few minutes, after which the liquid is 

 allowed to trickle out. 



"The nomad Andorobo people, besides killing innumerable col- 

 obus monkeys in the dense woods of the Mau and Nandi plateaux 

 (with poisoned arrows), sally out into the plains of the Rift Valley 



