A DOCTOR'S PRESCRIPTION 



pride had vanished. Half the skin was off his feet, 

 and he was glad enough to exchange the boots with 

 another boy for a pair of old putties. Really the 

 kindest thing a white man can do with his discarded 

 foot-gear is to burn it. Out of vanity some native will 

 be sure to wear the old boots or shoes and get horribly 

 footsore. From the point of view of appearances, 

 too, boots on a native are objectionable; they seem 

 to render him altogether awkward and clumsy, even 

 when he is in European uniform. One realised this 

 in comparing the late German native soldiers and the 

 bare-footed British African soldiers for smartness. 



Chumbo, one of my camera boys, was " sick in 

 the chest," which meant he had a bad cough, so I had 

 him sent to the Indian doctor in Naivasha. He had 

 returned feeling, or at any rate looking, most important, 

 bearing a Dewar's whisky bottle full of cough mixture, 

 which was to be taken three times a day. This was 

 the only load he carried until the " dower " or medicine 

 was finished, as he held that it was quite impossible 

 for a cure to have been effected until the bottle was 

 empty. 



On the first day we started to climb and trekked 

 about eight miles, the lake dropping away from us 

 as we were passing through forest country, the home 

 of innumerable baboons. In places the short trees 

 seemed alive with them, though the moment they 

 sighted us they hid in the dense undergrowth. There 



12 177 



