CHAPTER III 



THE EQUATORIAL TFvEHf OR— {Continued) 

 ON THE ENDERIT RIVER AND LAKE NAKURU 



Our camp on tlie Enderit River was surrounded by 

 park-like country, alternating between bush and broad, 

 open prairie, with part forest and glades of infinite 

 beauty, while everywhere the landscape was bounded 

 by the peaks and scaurs of distant mountains. 



Lovely as was our prospect, yet scarce a sign of its 



tropical site obtruded on 

 the view, or proclaimed 

 the fact that we sat 

 practically astride the 

 equator. In these up- 

 lands, the absence of 

 such evidence is con- 

 spicuous. Neither groves 

 of graceful palms, with 

 their troops of monkeys 

 and flights of shriekiug 

 parrots, nor tree-ferns 

 with feathery frondage, 

 or other fantastic forms 

 of foliage and plant-life 

 - such as one associates 

 with the torrid zone, 

 here arrest one's gaze. On the contrary, the landscape 

 of Enderit, as viewed afar, might well-nigh pass for a 

 British scene — not, it is true, in the crowded south or 

 the tame cultivation of the midlands, but rather amid 

 those wilder regions of my own northern home, where 

 Nature yet reigns unsubdued, unfenced, " unimproved." 

 There, as here, a shaggy fringe of self-sown scrub or 

 bush marks the course of winding burns ; natural woods 



18 



DRONGU. 



