FROM GILGIL TO KENIA 279 
As the sun mounted overhead, and the warmth pen- 
etrated the tangle overhanging the water, shrubs and 
flowers filled the air with pungent, aromatic scent, the 
smell of Africa’s rainy season. 
Down to the left bank of the river, grew an impenetrable 
euphorbia wood that clothed for miles the slopes on that 
side, and straight out of its gray-green mass rose one 
of those precipitous hills, too high to be called kopje yet 
scarcely a mountain. Up its rocky sides the all-conquering 
jungle had won its way, tearing at it, as it were, till the hill 
seemed to own nothing of itself but its crown, one splendid 
mass of red granite, which, clear and bold and quite bare 
of any shrub or greenery, looked full at the rising sun 
and in its early light shone a rosy red. In most of the 
woods of East Africa there is surprisingly little colour, as 
there is surprisingly little flower or fruit; everything in 
the vegetable world seems on the defensive, has all it can 
do to live, and has no time to be beautiful. But our little 
river seemed to have won for the gentler things some space 
and chance to twine and grow. White and purple con- 
volvuli hung from the wide-spread, cedar-like arms of 
the thorn trees, far over the yellow water, and swept down 
nearly to its surface. As they swayed in the morning air 
more beautiful and fragrant wreathes of colour one could 
not wish to see. 
Then the thorn tree, one of the hundred species of 
thorny mimosa here, was partially in flower, and when 
the mimosa tree flowers there is always the tireless African 
bee, surely one of the most cruelly used insects in the world. 
He has no winter time in which to rest and recuperate 
but toils all the long hot year around, and when his hardly 
won store is discovered by the keen-eyed native, aided by 
the honey bird, wood smoke does too quickly its deadly 
work, and grub, drone and worker all perish together. 
In these thorn trees hung on all sides N’dorobo honey 
