FROM GILGIL TO KENIA 275 



freshly drowned, in your soup and coffee, crawl in com- 

 panies into your food, nest in your hair, and will not come 

 out until killed, crawl up your nose (and not even furious 

 smoking will prevent them attempting to do this), and 

 cling on the morsel of food you are raising to your mouth, 

 while driven well-nigh frantic, you use your fork as an ex- 

 temporized fly-whisk. But why attempt the impossible ? 

 Their numbers, stickiness and persistence cannot be 

 described; mercifully the heavy rains banish most of 

 them at last! 



Our camping ground at this junction was a little oasis, 

 in the very middle of extensive, gray cactus brush. Taking 

 fresh life from the rain, it was as green as an English lawn, 

 and the bordering scrub rising high all around, we had 

 been well sheltered from the heavy storms that had drenched 

 the land. The river ran within a few yards of our tents, 

 and its banks were so rocky, its bars so sandy that no 

 mosquito pest forbade our pitching within the sound of 

 its waters: it is generally wise to camp well back from 

 a stream. The little waterfall close by had been very 

 pleasant to listen to both by night and day. It seemed 

 now to have added a deeper bass to its chorus of water 

 music, as the stream ran in spate, yellow and turbid among 

 its enclosing rocks. There was another little green prairie 

 just across the ford from our camp, also shut in by the 

 dense cactus scrub; and in the evenings you would see 

 the pretty shy gray monkeys come out to play and feed. 

 They would chase each other round and round its circle, 

 their tails, which were much longer than their bodies, 

 carried in a funny stiff half hoop-like curve as they ran. 

 Then suddenly one of them would espy something eatable, 

 and the game would stop while he sat up and ate it. 

 Rushing rivers and pleasant waterfalls are rather rare 

 things in this land and they were pleasant to look on and 

 to listen to. But the Guasi Nyiro is a real mountain river, 



