60 THE LAND OF THE’ LION 
Fifty miles of these green rolling hills and downs, with 
the stately forest ever bordering them, on your right, you 
must pass before you reach “the rock.” On these fine 
uplands there is little to remind you, but the waving clumps 
of feathery bamboo, dearly loved of the elephants, that 
you are travelling not only in the tropics, but almost under 
the Equator. 
Great beds of bracken, and on the higher slopes, masses 
of flowering heather, grow luxuriantly at the feet of the 
bamboo; and in some places thickets of a thorny bush 
exactly like our blackberry, but bearing luscious yellow 
fruit (the only good wild fruit I tasted in Africa) are found. 
The nights up here are bitterly cold, the altitude is over 
8,000 feet, and many of the porters are sure to be suffer- 
ing and ill. In the evenings there is not as much singing and 
dancing as usual. “The men cower over their fires, and you 
sit in a heavy overcoat near your own. I found the air 
most invigourating, and if I could fancy ever making a real 
home in Africa, and I think very few Europeans can, here 
is the place. 
There is but little game. An occasional hyena and, 
very rarely, a lion may be heard at night. African game, 
like African natives, seems to dislike the cold. Leopards 
are numerous, as their tracks tell, but you never see one. 
The Colobus monkey, late in the evening and very early in 
the morning, utters from the forest border his extraordinary 
cry —like a coffee-mill quickly grinding. But this land, 
though rich and beautiful, is as yet lonely, and still awaits, 
undeveloped, the coming of the white man’s plough and 
herds. 
The second day’s march from the boma brought us to the 
head waters of the Kerio River, a sort of watery dividing 
line between the streams flowing east and those we are 
soon to camp on, all of which empty themselves into Lake 
Victoria. ‘The Kerio has a long and a lonely way to go. 
