42 SAF^ARI 



hari from his own tent and give him orders to have 

 a man keep the fires up all night from then on. And 

 that was that. 



Because of the unending rain we hurried the build- 

 ing of permanent quarters as much as possible. 

 Most of the construction of shacks in British East 

 Africa outside of Mombasa and Nairobi we had 

 found rather crude. Prevailing style, if you care to 

 call it that, was mud and straw thatch or, nearer 

 the railroad and highways, hammered out petrol 

 tins. Usually the frames were made of tree poles 

 hastily cut with knives instead of axes, and tied 

 together with twine made from vines, the whole 

 covered with a dubious plastering of mud and 

 thatched with bunches of grass. 



We wanted something much more durable. So 

 we made our poles thicker and sank them deeper in 

 the ground; constructed stout sets of laths tied with 

 jungle twine, poured pebbles and mud into all the 

 spaces between, then stuccoed the whole with buffalo, 

 elephant and rhino dung. We took extra precautions 

 by mixing the dung with clay which made a service- 

 able exterior and interior wall. Previously all the 

 dung had been pressed by the boys who gathered it, 

 packed in pits, mixed with water, then trodden down 

 hard much as peasants press grapes in the French 

 provinces. When weathered a little the color, like 

 that of Chinese punk which also is made of dung, 



