350 



TO KEN I A 



children had all along known that we should do them no harm, 

 but the warriors could scarcely believe their ears and eyes 

 when they found themselves not only at liberty, but the owners 

 of all the wonderful things we had chosen for them. 



The next morning we resumed our march, crossing several 

 steep hills which had evidently once been well wooded, and 

 crossing two good-sized brooks flowing in an easterly direction, 

 camping on the farther side of the second in a sheltered ravine- 

 like valley. A few shy natives had followed us on this march, 

 and when some of our people went to fetch the flesh of a rhino- 

 ceros Count Teleki had shot by the way, they found it already 

 cut up, and the horns carried off. 



The scenery through which we had just passed impressed 

 us as very dreary and barren, but there were clumps of bush- 

 tree, euphorbia, and of Calotropis procera (Arab. Oschar). 

 To make up for this, the valley we were camped in was a 

 charming little nook, with its steep slopes covered with short 

 soft sward, from which rose here and there lofty isolated palms 

 with their feathery crowns of leaves. We wished we could 

 have made this the starting-point for our ascent of Kenia, but 

 it would have been on the one hand too near the frontier of 

 Kikuyuland, and on the other too far from Ndoro. So we 

 reluctantly left again the next morning. 



It was a long tramp in a north-easterly direction to Ndoro, 

 across a gently ascending undulating district, in which woods 

 alternated with greyish-brown openings overgrown with steppe 

 grass, great patches of the latter having, however, been here 

 and there recently burnt. Once we marched for nearly an 

 hour amongst beds of flowers through what might have been 

 a deserted park, the smooth sandy paths winding between 

 groves and clumps of trees. Nothing was wanting to complete 

 the illusion but the ruins of a castle. A rugged ravine hewn 

 deeply in the volcanic rock shut in this park, and descending 



