14 ENGLAND TO EAST AFRICA 



were many who had applied months previously for 

 land, and who had waited so long that, when at 

 last it was allotted to them, their capital was gone, 

 and they had not enough to pay down the sum 

 necessary before taking possession. A great deal 

 of the confusion was doubtless due to the transfer 

 of the colony from the Foreign Office to the 

 Colonial Office, which had taken place a few 

 months earlier, and much was due to the weakness 

 of the Survey Department, which was miserably 

 undermanned, and had not nearly completed its 

 work. 



Apropos of the survey, it might not be out of 

 place to mention the case of a surveyor whom I met 

 in the Naivasha district. He had served as a trooper 

 in South Africa, and had stayed in the country as a 

 surveyor after the war. A spirit of adventure made 

 him spend his whole fortune on the purchase of a 

 passage to Mombasa, where he landed without a 

 penny in his pocket. But there the Indian Penal 

 Code, which prevails in East Africa, arrested him 

 for his pennilessness and sentenced him to three 

 months' imprisonment, with subsequent deportation 

 to Bombay, of all places in the world. When his 

 term was almost at an end, he was rescued from 

 bondage by an official of the Survey Department, 

 who was crying out for assistance, and sent to work 

 — very successfully, I believe — on the survey of the 

 country. It was an interesting object-lesson to have 

 a glimpse, though only a passing one, of a new 



