26 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



ornament he affected. The other sais was a silent, gentle- 

 mannered black heathen; his name was Simba, a lion, 

 and as I shall later show he was not unworthy of it. The 

 two horses for which these men cared were stout, quiet 

 little beasts; one, a sorrel, I named Tranquillity, and the 

 other, a brown, had so much the coblike build of a zebra 

 that we christened him Zebra-shape. One of Kermit's 

 two horses, by the way, was more romantically named after 

 Huandaw, the sharp-eared steed of the Mabinogion. Cun- 

 inghame, lean, sinewy, bearded, exactly the type of hunter 

 and safari manager that one would wish for such an ex- 

 pedition as ours, had ridden up with us on the train, and at 

 the station we met Tarlton, and also two settlers of the 

 neighborhood, Sir Alfred Pease and Mr. Clifford Hill. 

 Hill was an Africander. He and his cousin, Harold Hill, 

 after serving through the South African war, had come to 

 the new country of British East Africa to settle, and they 

 represented the ideal type of settler for taking the lead in the 

 spread of empire. They were descended from the English 

 colonists who came to South Africa in 1820; they had never 

 been in England, and neither had Tarlton. It was exceed- 

 ingly interesting to meet these Australians and Africanders, 

 who typified in their lives and deeds the greatness of the 

 English Empire, and yet had never seen England. 



As for Sir Alfred, Kermit and I were to be his guests 

 for the next fortnight, and we owe primarily to him, to his 

 mastery of hunting craft, and his unvarying and generous 

 hospitality and kindness, the pleasure and success of our 

 introduction to African hunting. His life had been one 

 of such varied interest as has only been possible in our own 

 generation. He had served many years in Parliament; 

 he had for some years been a magistrate in a peculiarly re- 

 sponsible post in the Transvaal; he had journeyed and 

 hunted and explored in the northern Sahara, in the Soudan, 

 in Somaliland, in Abyssinia; and now he was ranching 

 in East Africa. A singularly good rider and one of the best 

 game shots I have ever seen, it would have been impossible 



