328 SPORT AND TRAVEL PAPERS 



Wanderobo, Nandi, and Kavirondo, near the Lake. Fashions 

 vary greatly among all the tribes ; clothing, exceedingly scanty 

 always, becomes less and more infinitestimal until among the 

 Kavirondo at Kisumu, the terminus of the railway, absolutely 

 none remains. The native market here goes by the name of the 

 " Garden of Eden " before the fig-leaf period. Everybody walks 

 about as Adam and Eve are supposed to have done before the 

 apple incident. 



Beads, blue ones, are the fashion among most of the tribes, 

 worn in strings on neck and arms, with heavy and many coils 

 of brass and iron wire on both extremities, to such an extent 

 often as to permit but slight movement of the elbow. Other 

 very weighty rings are arranged, one within the other of gradu- 

 ally increasing diameter, on a plane and worn round the ladies' 

 necks, resembling the rings encircling the planet Saturn ; holes 

 through the lobes of the ear, male and female, are enlarged to 

 an almost incredible extent by means of pegs and rings of wood, 

 gradually increasing in size until nothing but a thin loop of skin 

 remains. In this loop, adorned along the edge with blue beads, 

 are carried by way of ornament objects as large as preserved 

 milk tins, the whole weighted down by rings of wire until it 

 rests upon the shoulder. A Kikuyu youth in order to be in the 

 height of fashion must have his hair arranged in minute curls 

 and these plentifully smeared with castor oil and rubbed over 

 with earth which everywhere is of a rich crimson. Beads, 

 wire, distended ear-lobes are necessities, and a square piece of 

 cotton or bark cloth worn over the shoulder completes the 

 costume. Women, of course, do all the work, stagger under 

 the heaviest loads, often at the same time suckling a baby, while 

 their lord and master swaggers along in front, carrying nothing 

 but a stick or spear. 



The " Garden of Eden," most interesting in its primitive sim- 

 plicity, is a garden in name only ; a few sheds on a sandy plain 

 under an equatorial sun constitute the market, to which natives 

 bring their yams, dhurra, flour, bananas, chillies, sugar-cane, 

 spearheads, wire, and beads. Some cotton sheets with patterns 

 in the then fashionable chocolate colour are exposed for sale, but 

 do not seem to find many purchasers, Nature's simplest clothing 

 being much preferred. The contrast between primitive savagery 

 and high civilisation was indeed most striking as one stepped 



