FIREWOOD PLAIN 



291 



From tlie top of the spur we were crossing we, for the lirst 

 time, saw Mounts Kinangop and Goyito, the two loftiest heights 

 of the Aberdare range, which rise apart from the main chain 

 on the west, and appear to be isolated mountains, the former 

 with rounded summits, the latter with a picturesque chaos of 

 rocky peaks. 



Our ridge sloped gently southward, and the path led 

 through beautiful pastures, with grass as short and smooth as 

 if it had just been mown, succeeded presently by a light 

 leleshwa jungle. The district is called Angata Elgek, or the 

 firewood plain, because nearly all the trees in it are dead, their 

 bleached branches sticking stiffly out, whilst the ground is 

 strewn with stems and twigs. Leleshwa shrub, which grew 

 here and there to the height of a tree, was the only vegetation. 

 Some specimens, not unlike the European olive tree, were as 

 much as thirty feet high, with stems about twelve inches 

 in diameter, but these tree-forms have less foliage than the 

 shrubs, and the leaves are smaller. The whole Angata Elgek 

 district bore unmistakable traces of a great conflagration, and 

 we were quite at a loss to understand why Thomson assigned 

 quite a different reason for the peculiar appearance of the trees. ^ 

 The swampy lower course of the Naitolea brook is called the 

 Gilgil, and flows into Lake Naivasha, the whole of the gleaming- 

 surface of which was spread out before us on this march. 

 When we reached it, the brook was but a few feet wide, but 

 too deep for us to wade through it. We therefore remained 

 on the right bank, in the hope that the water might sink 

 before the next morning, or that we should find a ford. 

 Some Masai on the further bank knew of no ford, and this 

 little brook would have delayed us a long time, but, to our 



^ Thomson says, in Through Ma.sailand, p. 200, last edition : ' The marvellous 

 numbers of dead trees . . . seemed to have died from natural causes. What these 

 causes can have been I cannot say . . . probably the strange effect is due to either 

 a change of temperature or alteration of the rainfall.' — Trans. 



172 



