150 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



either following my back track or listening for voices. 

 Underfoot, the mud and water are hip-deep. This swamp 

 was the home of a herd of buffalo numbering perhaps 

 a hundred individuals. They are semi-aquatic beasts, and 

 their enormous strength enables them to plough through 

 the mud and water and burst their way among the papy- 

 rus stems without the slightest difficulty, whereas a man 

 is nearly helpless when once he has entered the reedbeds. 

 They had made paths hither and thither across the wamp, 

 these paths being three feet deep in ooze and black water. 

 There were little islands in the swamp on which they could 

 rest. Toward its lower end, where it ran into the Nairobi, 

 the Kamiti emerged from the papyrus swamp and became 

 a rapid brown stream of water with only here and there a 

 papyrus cluster along its banks. 



The Nairobi, which cut across the lower end of the 

 farm, and the Rewero, which bounded it on the other side 

 from the Kamiti, were as different as possible from the 

 latter. Both were rapid streams broken by riffle and water- 

 fall, and running at the bottom of tree-clad valleys. The 

 Nairobi Falls, which were on Heatley's Ranch, were sin- 

 gularly beautiful. Heatley and I visited them one evening 

 after sunset, coming home from a day's hunt. It was 

 a ride I shall long remember. We left our men, and 

 let the horses gallop. As the sun set behind us, the long 

 lights changed the look of the country and gave it a beauty 

 that had in it an element of the mysterious and the unreal. 

 The mountains loomed both larger and more vague than 

 they had been in the bright sunlight, and the plains lost 

 their look of parched desolation as the afterglow came and 

 went. We were galloping through a world of dim shade 

 and dying color; and, in this world, our horses suddenly 

 halted on the brink of a deep ravine from out of which 

 came the thunder of a cataract. We reined up on a jutting 

 point. The snowy masses of the fall foamed over a ledge 

 on our right, and below at our feet was a great pool of 

 swirling water. Thick-foliaged trees, of strange shape 



