6 ON SAFARI 



Yet it was precisely the lack of tliese necessaries (in 

 the carriage beside me) that proved my undoing. 



The Uganda railway, after traversing the 100-mile 

 coast-belt — the low-lying, malarial Taru desert — at once 

 ascends to the highland plateaux beyond. During 

 that first night's journey the traveller is carried up to 

 nearly 4,000 ft. above sea-level, and into a temperature 

 that, by comparison, chills with a marrow-piercing cold. 

 At sundown you are melting ; before midnight, frozen. 

 When darkness closes in the scene is truly tropical : 

 there are palms, bananas, papyrus and the rest. When 

 daylight dawns it reveals bramble and bracken, sometimes 

 even hoar-frost. 



This nio-ht-cold cuts to the bone — unless one is 

 provided with the simple necessary wraps, m my case 

 overlooked. The result was an internal chill, followed 

 by colic, terminating in fever. 



Cruel was the disappointment. Already, while 

 traversing the Athi Plains, we had witnessed the abund- 

 ance of wild game, and keenness to get among them 

 passed all bounds ; yet now, for a weary fortnight, I 

 was held up with fever and a temperature anywhere 

 around 106 degrees. Lucky, indeed, that this occurred 

 at Nairobi, where there was a medico of sorts, rough 

 though kindly, and where prescriptions were (in those 

 days) dispensed in empty beer-bottles. Nairobi's single 

 wood-built hotel of that epoch (since burnt out), run on 

 the usual free-and-easy colonial lines, compares not with 

 the palatial structures of the modern capital (things 

 move fast thereaway), yet was thoroughly comfortable. 

 More than that, at the hands of the two Miss Raynes — 

 busy as they were with a thousand more important 

 thino's — I received durino; this illness a care and attention 

 that will ever remain a grateful memory. 



Meanwhile, within an afternoon's walk of the town, 

 my brother Walter had found abundant game — harte- 

 beests and zebra, gazelles, ostrich, cranes and bustard — 

 and had already opened our score. But, so soon as the 

 crisis of the fever had passed, he left me and went on 



