TRADERS FROM LEIKIPIA 



165 



gency that he had wiped out a long score we had against him. 

 The poor grey donkeys were so exhausted after their three 

 water trips that they stood motionless on the bank, and we had 

 to push and drag them on, one by one, before they would stir 

 on their own account. An hour's splash through the gathering- 

 darkness, across a steppe covered with from four to eight inches 

 of water, brought this long day's work to an end at Little 

 Arusha. 



Our tent was pitched in the midst of the camp of a trading- 

 caravan some 170 strong, as it was the only dry place to be had. 

 These traders had come from Leikipia, and had already been 

 waiting here two months for another caravan, which had gone to 

 Ngaboto, a district on the north of Lake Baringo. They had 

 collected a lot of ivory, and, as they expressed it, done a bias- 

 chera Jcu, or good business. They had buried their treasures 

 to protect them from fire. The leaders, with Mpujui, the best 

 speaker of the Masai language and a great friend of Jumbe 

 Kimemeta, at their head, had come to meet Count Teleki on 

 his arrival, and presented him with some beautiful white maize 

 meal as a token of welcome. 



Little Arusha, or Arusha-wa-Chini, is a settlement of Wa- 

 kwaii not unlike the Wataveta in their mode of life. Sur- 

 rounded as they are by watercourses, they can to a great- 

 extent dispense with the protection of the forest, but neither is 

 that altogether wanting. Sometimes Taveta and sometimes 

 Little Arusha, according to the direction of the journey, is 

 appointed as the rendezvous of caravans going from or to the 

 coast. There are four routes to Masailand from the sea. The 

 first and most easterly leads through Ukambani to Ngongo 

 Bagas ; the second skirts along the eastern base of Kilimanjaro 

 in a northerly direction ; the third passes between Mounts Meru 

 and Kilimanjaro; and the fourth goes, by way of Arusha- wa-ju, 

 northward, west of them. The big hongo exacted by the 



