-^ The Spell of the Elelescho 



impressions derived from my week of marching through 

 lonely primeval forests, bamboo thickets, and grassy 

 plains — scenes in which, as my friend Richard Kandt, 

 the discoverer of the source of the Nile, so strikingly 

 remarks,^ every plant, every stone, seems to cry out again 

 to one in the vast solitude but one word : '' The desert ! 

 the desert ! " 



In the early morning hours of January 15 there was 

 a light continuous rainfall. A short march of only two 

 hours brought us to our camping place on the shore of 

 Lake Nakuro. 



Far away extended the panorama of the lake, which 

 lay before us filling its hollow bed, with its banks at this 

 season of the year yielding fresh pastures to numberless 

 herds of wild animals, and its waters affording rest and 

 food to countless members of the feathered tribe. I had 

 hardly ever seen greater numbers of the pretty little 

 dwarf gazelles {Gazella thomsoni, Gthr.). Thousands and 

 thousands more of these graceful creatures showed them- 

 selves on the fresh, green, grassy meadows of the lake 

 margin, or scattered over its pebble beds of obsidian, 

 augite, and pumice-stone. Wherever one turned one's 

 gaze it fell again and again upon these beautiful gazelles, 

 which in many ways reminded one of wild goats at 

 pasture, and were so strangely trustful that they often 

 allowed the spectator to come quite close to them. 

 Marked as are the colours of its hairy covering, the 

 dwarf gazelle does not stand out boldly from the back- 

 ground, whether this be a plain blackened by bush-fires, 



1 Dr. Richard Kandt, Caput Nilu (Berlin : Dietrich Reimer.) 



^9 



