424 THE LAND OF THE LION 
not stumble on them, or if you have no native scouts who 
know the habitat of the game, you may not be aware of the 
opportunities you have thrown away till you are a hun- 
dred miles distant. 
One more determined effort I would make to get my 
buffalo, and I so laid my plans that if these green hilly 
ridges would not give me one, I would go farther down 
stream and try the swampy and less healthy country towards 
Embo. 
As we made our way slowly over the crests of the hills 
and descended rapidly towards the Tana Valley, the heat 
was oppressive; the hills shut us in, and shut off the cool 
Kenia breezes that are so refreshing in the evening as you 
sit at your tent door and face the lovely mountain; and 
the men were fagged and thirsty when we pitched camp, 
beneath a precipitous slope that rose 2,500 feet above our 
heads. 
My friends at Punda Melia had provided me with a 
local hunter, a Kikuyu, whose soubriquet was “Plumes,” 
a good man on lions, and a fair tracker. He knew the 
country well, and was confident we should at least find 
fresh sign of buffalo before making camp. But it was 
not to be. Buffalo there had been, but it was several weeks 
since they had visited the ravines we were crossing. 
The country is so broken up hereabouts, there are so 
many gorges and dongas and corners in it and buffalo go 
to bed so early in the morning, feeding only at night, hid- 
ing themselves almost as soon as the sun is up, that unless 
you have the good fortune to come on a large herd you may 
hunt for days, and not get a shot. 
Here, too, the ground is extraordinarily hard. The 
ponderous rhino’ scarcely leaves a sign, and were it not 
that the heavy night dews lie on the grass where cliffs 
and trees shade it for more than two hours after sunrise, 
success would be largely a matter of mere luck. 
