20 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



medan negroes, clad like the askaris, reported to me as my 

 gun-bearers, Muhamed and Bakari; seemingly excellent 

 men, loyal and enduring, no trackers, but with keen eyes 

 for game, and the former speaking a little English. My 

 two horse boys, or saises, were both pagans. One, Hamisi, 

 must have had in his veins Galla or other non-negro blood; 

 derived from the Hamitic, or bastard Semitic, or at least 

 non-negro, tribes which, pushing slowly and fitfully south- 

 ward and south-westward among the negro peoples, have 

 created an intricate tangle of ethnic and linguistic types 

 from the middle Nile to far south of the equator. Hamisi 

 always wore a long feather in one of his sandals, the only 

 ornament he affected. The other sais was a silent, gentle- 

 mannered black heathen; his name was Simba, a lion, 

 and as I shall later show he was not unworthy of it. The 

 two horses for which these men cared were stout, quiet 

 little beasts; one, a sorrel, I named Tranquillity, and the 

 other, a brown, had so much the coblike build of a zebra 

 that we christened him Zebra-shape. One of Kermit's 

 two horses, by the way, was more romantically named after 

 Huandaw, the sharp-eared steed of the Mabinogion. Cun- 

 inghame, lean, sinewy, bearded, exactly the type of hunter 

 and safari manager that one would wish for such an ex- 

 pedition as ours, had ridden up with us on the train, and at 

 the station we met Tarlton, and also two settlers of the 

 neighborhood, Sir Alfred Pease and Mr. Clifford Hill. 

 Hill was an Africander. He and his cousin, Harold Hill, 

 after serving through the South African war, had come to 

 the new country of British East Africa to settle, and they 

 represented the ideal type of settler for taking the lead in the 

 spread of empire. They were descended from the English 



