FROM GILGIL TO KENIA 265 



ful) that you can travel unarmed, if you wish, over 

 every square mile of Massai land. From the natives 

 you will receive nothing but courtesy and yet but a very 

 little while ago they were accounted the most bloody and 

 intractible savages of East Africa! 



Here the rhino alone occasionally resents your intrus- 

 ion. Once in a dozen times, perhaps, he puts your sefari 

 to rout, on the other eleven times he rushes snorting away. 



It is hard to realize that much of the country we were 

 about to hunt, particularly that lying beyond the Laikipia 

 Boma and across the Guasi Nyiro, had until two years 

 ago only been visited by a very few white men, and to 

 visit it then they risked their lives. 



Where else in all the world within six weeks of London 

 could a country so new, so strange, so beautiful be found ? 



But she offers more than strangeness and beauty to 

 men like myself, tired and no longer young. She offers 

 more freely, more certainly than any land I know, the untold 

 boon of reasonable exercise with quietness and rest. 



Day after day as you travel slowly from stream to 

 stream, from valley to table land and then down to wood 

 and stream again, always greeted and interested by some 

 new experience, some bit of knowledge that comes as 

 it were leisurely to welcome you; riding along five miles 

 or twenty as the fancy takes you, watching your little 

 army crawl like a long, brown snake across the veldt as you 

 stand on some higher ground above them. The peace 

 and independence of it all slowly but surely sinks into 

 you; you are at last centuries, generations, away from 

 that torrent life in which you lately swam and in which 

 you have worn out your strength in swimming -- Life 

 "with its sick hurry and disappointed aim," as Matthew 

 Arnold describes it, has faded very far away; you drink 

 it all in and feel something within you making, if not for 

 Shakespeare's "Sea change," yet still none the less for 



