ROOSEVELT HUNTING GROUNDS. 7\ 



as a jail; two Indian bazaars built of corrugated iron, and several rows 

 of grass huts for the 150 soldiers and police on duty. Embo stands 

 for the authority which keeps in subjection 75,000 natives, most of them 

 little beyond savagery. Its terrible jail consists of a tiny room, seldom 

 occupied by a prisoner except as a comfortable sleeping place. Now 

 that the native tribes are pacified the soldiers have little to do, while the 

 police are mainly concerned with the enforcement of the game laws. The 

 civil authorities stationed at Embo and Fort Hall have under their eyes 

 the Mount Kenia region, which is wonderful both for its beauties as well 

 as zoological variety. 



A BABOON'S PARADISE. 



Perhaps the first noteworthy feature of the approach to Mount Kenia 

 is the bright colors of the flowers — blue, yellow, pink and crimson. After 

 a rain the velts are covered with these little beauties, which protest 

 against the general charge that an East African landscape is almost 

 colorless. As the blue-wooded ridges skirting the mountain unfold in 

 detail, the stunted jumper appears and higher still the wild olive grows 

 along the river banks. Still miles away from the actual base of Kenia, 

 approaching from the northwest, the traveler enters a tract which has 

 never been better described than in the following: "The level country 

 is thickly sov/n for twenty-five miles with great masses of red granite, 

 outcroppings of the same formation. A Celt would say that the devil 

 or the giants had been at war or play in the old days, and that these 

 rocks were the mighty sling-stones they had hurled from the mountains 

 at each other. Some of them are one hundred feet high, some nearer 

 four hundred feet ; all are imposing. Round their rocky bases the grass 

 grows so smooth and fresh it might be a carefully tended lawn. Some- 

 times the dust of the great stones must have added a richness to the 

 soil; and the sward, smooth still, has buried their broad bases for some 

 feet under its carpet. Then the prairie falls away from one, and rises 

 gently towards the next in curves and dips of green. They are half a 

 mile apart, or only fifty yards, as it may be. Some rise sheer and steep 

 with no crack or crevice for bush or vine. On some dwarfed wild fig 

 trees climb and cling. All are of a rich red granite, and the sides and 

 crowns shine and glisten gloriously in the light of the rising and set- 

 ting sun. In the highest and most inaccessible, great troops of little 



