190 THE HIGHLAND WILDERNESS [chap, vi 



in bold lines, the folly of those who ideahze the life of 

 even exceptionally good and pleasant-natured savages. 



Although it was the rainy season, the trip up to this 

 point had not been difficult, and from May to October, 

 when the climate is dry and at its best, there would be 

 practically no hardship at all for travellers and visitors. 

 This is a healthy plateau. But, of course, the men 

 who do the first pioneering, even in country Uke this, 

 encounter dangers and run risks ; and they make pay- 

 ment with their bodies. At more than one halting- 

 place we had come across the forlorn grave of some 

 soldier or labourer of the Commission. The grave- 

 mound lay within a rude stockade ; and an uninscribed 

 wooden cross, grey and weather-beaten, marked the 

 last resting-place of the unknown and forgotten man 

 beneath, the man who had paid with his humble life 

 the cost of pushing the frontier of civUization into the 

 wild savagery of the wilderness. Farther west the con- 

 ditions become less healthy. At this station Colonel 

 Rondon received news of sickness and of some deaths 

 among the employees of the commission in the country 

 to the westward, which we were soon to enter. Beriberi 

 and malignant malarial fever were the diseases which 

 claimed the major number of the victims. 



Surely these are " the men who do the work for 

 which they draw the wage." Kermit had with him the 

 same copy of Kipling's poems which he had carried 

 through Africa. At these falls there was one sunset of 

 angry splendour ; and we contrasted this going down 

 of the sun, through broken rain-clouds and over leagues 

 of wet tropical forest, with the desert sunsets we had 

 seen in Arizona and Sonora, and along the Guaso Nyiro 

 north and west of Mount Kenia, when the barren 

 mountains were changed into flaming " ramparts of 



