CHAPTER X 



GOOD-BYE SERGOIT 



THE Nzoia Plateau and the country to north of it bounded 

 by the Suk mountains, is only a little corner in the 

 great and very imperfectly known territory called British 

 East Africa, but for travellers and sportsmen its interests 

 are unsurpassed. I feel I have good grounds for urging 

 its claims on all who, like myself, enjoy seeing the strange 

 things and people of this old world of ours, before they are 

 changed beyond recognition. 



Under these inevitable processes we call civilizing, 

 all things belonging to savage man suffer change. The 

 tribes lived and only lived by struggling; failed in the fight 

 or won. Some quality, not unworthy to survive, there always 

 must have been. 



We come suddenly, ruthlessly; and in a few years the 

 long past is swallowed up and forgotten, as though it had 

 never been. 



We call them, nay we force them, from paths and cus- 

 toms and laws they knew, to ways they know nothing of; our 

 ways, not their ways. 



We take from them what they have slowly learned to 

 approve and value; we give them in exchange, what costs 

 us little, sometimes alas, our cheapest and our worst, both 

 in vices and in men. 



Kindly pardon my digression and let me get back to 

 my last, involuntary, lion ride. 



Our camp was pitched ten miles north of the Rock by 

 a little sluggish stream that crawled down to the sources 

 of the Nzoia. 



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