100 TAVETA AND MOUNTS KILIMANJARO AND MERU 



would grin, sliow his teetli, and scowl at me. If I made him 

 understand that I would not put up with this, he would revenge 

 himself b}^ flying at the first coloured man who passed, pinching 

 him and pulling his hair. Hamis often made us angry ; but he 

 was so very amusing that, whatever his misdeeds, we always 

 ended by forgiving him. 



Never did our little pet have a jollier time than in Taveta. 

 The women and children, whom he never bit, plied him perpetu- 

 ally with bananas and sugar-cane, whilst the boys gave him 

 locusts and beetles ; and with it all Hamis maintained an air of 

 condescending grandeur which was irresistibly comic. 



We got to know the people of Taveta very well in our long, 

 almost uninterrupted intercourse with them. The first impres- 

 sion they always make is, that they are extremely primitive in 

 their ideas and ways, which seems the more surprising consider- 

 ing how many visitors they have from the coast ; but nearer 

 acquaintance proves that, like all the other tribes living near 

 the Masai, they really, in many respects, more or less closely 

 resemble that well-known type. 



This is the less surprising as some fifty years ago the 

 Tavetaners were joined by a considerable number of Wakwafi, 

 originally a branch of the great Masai family, who, after being- 

 decimated by a long and bloody civil war, had dispersed in 

 every direction. Deprived of nearly all their cattle, they had 

 been obliged to give up their pastoral life, and were now 

 scattered about all round Masailand as tillers of the soil, many 

 of them having settled down in the woods between Taveta 

 and Lake Jipe. 



The Masai style of costume is, however, servilely copied 

 only by young people of Ijotli sexes. The young men, as a 

 rule, wear one garment only, a short mantle made of hairy 

 goatskin or of some brownish red cotton stuff, which covers 

 the left side of the body, and is fastened on the right shoulder. 



