FROM GILGIL TO KENIA 265 
ful) —that you can travel unarmed, if you wish, over 
every square mile of Massai land. From the natives 
you will receive nothing but courtesy and yet but a very 
little while ago they were accounted the most bloody and 
intractible savages of East Africa! 
Here the rhino alone occasionally resents your intrus- 
ion. Once in a dozen times, perhaps, he puts your sefari 
to rout, on the other eleven times he rushes snorting away. 
It is hard to realize that much of the country we were 
about to hunt, particularly that lying beyond the Laikipia 
Boma and across the Guasi Nyiro, had until two years 
ago only been visited by a very few white men, and to 
visit it then they risked their lives. 
Where else in all the world within six weeks of London 
could a country so new, so strange, so beautiful be found? 
But she offers more than strangeness and beauty to 
men like myself, tired and no longer young. She offers 
more freely, more certainly than any land I know, the untold 
boon of reasonable exercise with quietness and rest. 
Day after day as you travel slowly from stream to 
stream, from valley to table land and then down to wood 
and stream again, always greeted and interested by some 
mew experience, some bit of knowledge that comes as 
it were leisurely to welcome you; riding along five miles 
or twenty as the fancy takes you, watching your little 
army crawl like a long, brown snake across the veldt as you 
stand on some higher ground above them. The peace 
and independence of it all slowly but surely sinks into 
you; you are at last centuries, generations, away from 
that torrent life in which you lately swam and in which 
you have worn out your strength in swimming — Life 
“with its sick hurry and disappointed aim,’ as Matthew 
Arnold describes it, has faded very far away; you drink 
it all in and feel something within you making, if not for 
Shakespeare’s ‘‘Sea change,” yet still none the less for 
