NZOIA PLATEAU AND ITS TRIBES 209 
to establish homesteads here, to say, that they have been 
the first to see, and avail themselves of, the advantages of 
the Nzoia Plateau. So far as a stranger could judge of 
them, by talking with their leaders, they were appreciative 
of the country, and of the easy conditions offered them to 
acquire homesteads in it. The Boer certainly has a good 
eye for country. He will take trouble to find the land that 
suits him, and having found it he sits down on it, and makes 
a home. ‘This is just what the Englishman out here does 
not do, he crowds where some of his fellow countrymen have 
already settled, and even then nine times out of ten only 
buys that he may sell at the earliest possible moment. 
Now the Boer may move on in this land, as he has moved 
on and on in other lands. But even if he does, he yet stays 
long enough to outstay the Englishman. And I must say 
it looks at present as if he was likely to hold and control 
ultimately much that is best in the Protectorate. He objects 
to the present arrangement of long lease for the land, he 
prefers actual ownership, but since that is denied him by 
the law as it now stands, he takes up his holding on the best 
conditions permitted him, confident in his own stubborn 
mind, that long before his eighty or ninety years lease is out 
he will have a good deal to say as to the terms of its renewal. 
He is wise in his day and generation is the Boer, he knows. 
that the man who stays by the land, will in the end settle the. 
terms by which the land stays by him. 
Of all these things and many more I thought as I saw 
the sun setting beyond western Elgon. Ah, indeed, whoever 
holds it, this is a land beautiful as it is rich, and so far as 
human foreknowledge can go, likely to furnish homes of 
peace and plenty in the future. 
For many years this green land has been tenantless, the 
chosen haunt of bands of lions and herds of game. But it 
was not always so. If the dead could come back to claim 
their own, if ghosts of cruelly injured peoples walked and 
