TO THE UASIN GISHU 



325 



in the South African War, and was now one of the heads 

 of the Boma Trading Company. Among our fellow guests 

 at this dinner was Captain Douglas Pennant of the British 

 Army. When we went north to Kenia he went south to 

 the Sotik. There he made a fine bag of lions; but having 

 wounded a leopard and followed it into cover it suddenly 

 sprang on him, apparently from a tree. His life was saved 

 by his Somali gun-bearer who blew out the leopard's brains 

 as it bore him to the ground, so that it had time to make 

 only one bite; but this bite just missed crushing in the skull, 

 broke the jaw, tore off one ear, and caused ghastly wreck. 

 He spent some weeks in the hospital at Nairobi, and then 

 went for further treatment to England; his place in the 

 hospital being taken by another man who had been injured 

 by a leopard. 



There had been quite a plague of wild beasts in Nairobi 

 itself. One family had been waked at midnight by a 

 leopard springing on the roof of the house and thence to an 

 adjacent shed; it finally spent a couple of hours on the 

 veranda. A lion had repeatedly wandered at night through 

 the outlying (the residential) portion of the town. Dr. 

 Milne, the head of the Government Medical Department, 

 had nearly run into it on his bicycle, and, as a measure of 

 precaution, guests going out to dinner usually carried 

 spears or rifles. One night I dined with the Provincial 

 Commissioner, Mr. Hobley, and the next with the town 

 clerk, Captain Sanderson. In each case the hostess, the 

 host, and the house were all delightful, and the evening 

 just like a very pleasant evening spent anywhere in civiliza- 

 tion; the houses were only half a mile apart; and yet on the 

 road between them a fortnight previously a lady on a 



