CHAPTER XII 



ELMENTEITA 



(ll) IN FEBRUARY 



Early in February 1906, eighteen months after the 

 events described in the last chapter, we returned to 

 Elmenteita, our primary object being to set out thence 

 on an expedition among the Laikipia mountains, distant 

 some seventy or eighty miles to the northward. Before 

 starting, however, we intended to spend a few days at 

 this point, renewing the happy memories of 1904. 



To all outward appearance, Elmenteita remained 

 precisely as we had left it — the station, a tiny tin shanty 

 standing utterly alone, a speck amidst boundless veld and 

 prairie, across which runs that puny three-foot railway, 

 a mere thread, over hill and dale. Great changes, never- 

 theless, had occurred — changes that, as foreshadowing 

 development in our new colony, one must regard with 

 satisfaction, though in the breast of sportsman and 

 naturalist a pang of regret will not be suppressed. 



The whole of the lands south of the railway line had 

 meanwhile been sold to private owners, and we could 

 only survey at a distance our erstwhile lovely hunting- 

 grounds stretching away down the Enderit River to 

 Lake Nakuru. True, the new owners were said to be 

 oblio;ino; enouoh in o-rantins; leave to shoot — some even 

 wantino- the oame destroved ; but in Africa we ask no 

 man's leave, and it was to the north side we had come 

 to turn our attention.^ 



1 Only a few months later we read in the Nairobi newspaper 

 Tlie Globe Trotter, that all the lands northward from the railway 

 extending to Lake Elmenteita and beyond it to the escarpment, had 

 likewise been sold — so rapid hereaway is the process of colonisation ! 



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