CHAPTER II 

 ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 



THE house at which we were staying stood on the beau- 

 tiful Kitanga hills. They were so named after an English- 

 man, to whom the natives had given the name of Kitanga; 

 some years ago, as we were told, he had been killed by a 

 lion near where the ranch house now stood; and we were 

 shown his grave in the little Machakos graveyard. The 

 house was one story high, clean and comfortable, with a 

 veranda running round three sides; and on the veranda 

 were lion skins and the skull of a rhinoceros. From the 

 house we looked over hills and wide lonely plains; the 

 green valley below, with its flat-topped acacias, was very 

 lovely; and in the evening we could see, scores of miles 

 away, the snowy summit of mighty Kilimanjaro turn 

 crimson in the setting sun. The twilights were not long; 

 and when night fell, stars new to northern eyes flashed 

 glorious in the sky. Above the horizon hung the Southern 

 Cross, and directly opposite in the heavens was our old 

 familiar friend the Wain, the Great Bear, upside down and 

 pointing to a North Star so low behind a hill that we could 

 not see it. It is a dry country, and we saw it in the second 

 year of a drought; yet I believe it to be a country of high 

 promise for settlers of white race. In many ways it reminds 

 one rather curiously of the great plains of the West, where 

 they slope upward to the foot-hills of the Rockies. It is a 

 white man's country. Although under the equator, the 

 altitude is so high that the nights are cool, and the re- 

 gion as a whole is very healthy. I saw many children, of 

 the Boer immigrants, of English settlers, even of American 

 missionaries, and they looked sound and well. Of course, 

 there was no real identity in any feature; but again and 

 again the landscape struck me by its general likeness to the 



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