198 SAFARI 



ettas to move to other watering places with their 

 cattle and sheep and camels, leaving me three good 

 waterholes for photography. But it was weeks 

 before the game came back. Finally, when I built 

 my blinds I encountered several weeks of murky 

 weather. And after the clouds cleared the coimtry 

 became so dry that every movement filled the air 

 with alkali dust; and then came prairie fires to add 

 smoke to the trouble. I was five months on two 

 safaris before I got pictures. It is about the last 

 word in camera troubles when one has to buy a 

 waterhole to give a zebra a drink — and then gets 

 burned out! 



It must be realized, too, that a camera safari is 

 much more pretentious and exacting an undertaking 

 than a mere hunt where one is concerned only with 

 food and ammunition. Photographic equipment alone 

 runs to a considerable weight and must be carried in 

 duplicate to guard against losses and accidents. On 

 one safari, when Daniel Pomeroy was with us, we left 

 Nairobi with six motor cars and about forty porters. 

 We travelled three days to the north and spent ten 

 days trying to get rhino pictures. We saw thirty- 

 nine rhinos in the ten days and got close to many 

 of them — for a moment. But always they got our 

 scent and ran, or they stayed with fiendish persistence 

 in places where photography was impossible, or else 

 the light failed us. We had -to leave after that 



