2o8 THE GAME OF BRITISH EAST AFRICA. 



When you are six months or a year absent from any depot or station, it is 

 manifestly impossible to carry enough food for the men for even a quarter of this 

 time. If every man carried nothing but his own food, he could only take enough to 

 last him for a little over a month. For this reason you have, when on long treks, to 

 depend on local supplies. 



As regards your own food, it is as well to arrange, if possible, for enough stores 

 to do yourself fairly well for as long a period as possible ; and after that time to still 

 have at least enough tea, salt, and tobacco to last you through the whole journey. 



As to local supplies, sometimes you can get practically nothing at all, and 

 at other times, if you are constantly on the look-out, you can manage fairly well. 

 Of vegetables, whenever you find any you should lay in a stock at once, for it does 

 not follow that because at one village there happen to be pumpkins and sweet 

 potatoes that there will also be pumpkins and potatoes at the next. Sometimes you 

 arrive at a cultivated country and find a few vegetable commodities, but, as the 

 natives are unwilling to sell them, you pass on, thinking that you will obtain plenty 

 of opportunities further on, but, on arrival at the next place, you find that there is 

 nothing ripe or that there are none at all. 



Of vegetables, there are pumpkins, sweet potatoes, yams, bananas, tomatoes, 

 beans, and peas, obtainable in different localities, though seldom all together, and then 

 they only ripen at certain seasons. If the bananas are unripe they may be used as a 

 vegetable, cooked in a mash. Pounded cassava root, also cooked in a mash, makes 

 a good eating vegetable. Natives always wait until the peas are hard and dry before 

 picking them, but, if secured in the young green pods, they may be eaten as French 

 beans. An excellent mash is made by soaking the ordinary broad beans, then 

 pounding them and cooking with chillies. Then the green tops to the sweet potato 

 may be used as a spinach, and there are also several other leaves, some cultivated 

 and some wild, known to the natives, that form a good spinach. 



Fairly good chupaties may be made from a dough of red flour* and fried in fat. 

 A porridge also can be made from the same flour as, too, from the coarser flour of the 

 millet (mtama) and Indian corn (mahindi). 



Your cook will always be bothering you for fat. I do not know what he does 

 with it exactly, but plenty of it seems to keep him happy, and if he does not get it 

 the cooking deteriorates. Some people issue tins and tins of marrow fat for cooking 

 purposes. It must be very nice to be rich enough to be able to afford such a luxury, 

 but it strikes me as rather a waste of money. Before starting on a trek I generally 

 send the cook to buy a couple of fat sheeps' tails, which he melts down and uses 



* The red flour is made from wimbi (Swahili). 



