Big Game Shooting 



day was bright and beautiful and the weather 

 warm, and it was in reality more our fault than 

 the ducks', that we did not get a better bag. We 

 had started out lazy and we slacked it thoroughly. 

 On the way home it was impossible not to notice 

 the beauties of nature around. 



To the south and west the Mau escarpment, 

 towering some four thousand feet high, purple and 

 shimmering in the heat reflected off the sunlit lake. 

 The sun almost down, and then edging the tips 

 of the mountains with golden outlines. A 

 sapphire sky above. Longonot standing out to- 

 wards the south in sweltering brown and purple. 

 We lay like logs, and bid the boatmen pull us 

 home through it all. Through broad bays choke- 

 full of water-lilies and other aquatic flowering 

 plants, with the invariable, never-ending banks of 

 papyrus fringing the whole, and towards the east 

 the sunlit, placid waters, dotted all over with the 

 feathered tribe. Content as we were with every- 

 thing and ourselves, this was another example of 

 the ''peace of Africa." 



I will summarize the third day's sport by saying 

 that we combined shooting in the reeds as on the 

 first day, and had natives in boats as well, so as 

 to keep the birds fairly on the move, and profited 

 accordingly ; and break off into another day's duck 

 and snipe shooting, in which I was the sole par- 

 ticipant, this time on Lake Olborlossat. 



We had had a very long and trying march 

 230 



