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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



tains, which have to be ascended by the 

 Uganda Railway, further north than 

 Lake Naivasha, at considerable difficulty 

 and expense. Here the railroad is car- 

 ried to an altitude of 8,300 feet before it 

 begins to descend the western slope of 

 the plateau. 



Lake Naivasha is almost in the middle 

 of the western Masai country. The dwell- 

 ings of the cattle-keeping Masai are small 

 flat-roofed structures. The Masai women 

 are scrupulously clothed, originally in 

 dressed skin, but today often in cloth. 

 They are sharply distinguished from their 

 husbands and brothers, who very osten- 

 tatiously wear no clothing for purposes 

 of decency. The Masai have attracted a 

 great deal of attention ever since Joseph 

 Thomson, the explorer, together with Dr 

 Fischer (an'equally distinguished explorer 

 of German nationality), laid bare to us 

 Masailand. The Masai have been the oc- 

 casion of terrible havoc throughout East 

 Africa by the attacks they made on all 

 settled peoples. At some unknown period 

 in their racial career a very great part of 

 the Masai decided they would not till the 

 fields any longer, but that they would 

 take away the cattle of other tribes not 

 strong enough to resist them. This is 

 one of the reasons why so many of these 

 beautiful plateaus of the present day are 

 absolutely devoid of human inhabitants 

 except a few European settlers who have 

 come there. It was not that the negroes 

 objected to the climate; they simply 

 wiped one another out. This process has 

 occurred over and over again in many 

 parts of Africa. No one has ever been so 

 cruel to the negro as the negro himself. 

 The Masai are now great cultivators. 



Their towns are surrounded by belts of 

 tall trees, mainly acacias, some of which 

 must be considerably over a hundred feet 

 in height, with green boughs and trunks 

 and ever-present flaky films of pinnated 

 foliage. In the rainy time of the year 

 these trees are loaded with tiny golden 

 balls of flowers, like tassels of floss silk, 

 which exhale a most delicious perfume 

 of honey. In the plains between the vil- 

 lages Grevy's zebra and a few oryx an- 

 telopes scamper about, while golden and 



black jackals hunt for small prey in 

 broad daylight, with a constant whimper- 

 ing. 



Enormous baboons sit in the branches 

 of the huge trees ready to rifle the native 

 crops at the least lack of vigilance on 

 the part of the boy guardians. Large 

 herds of cattle and troops of isabella-col- 

 ored donkeys, with broad black shoulder- 

 stripes, go out in the morning to graze, 

 and return through a faint cloud of dust, 

 which is turned golden by the setting sun 

 in the mellow evening, the cattle lowing 

 and occasionally fighting, the asses kick- 

 ing, plunging, and biting one another. 



THEIR DEAD ARE) DEVOURED BY HYENAS 



After sunset, as the dusk rapidly 

 thickens into night, forms like misshapen, 

 ghostly wolves will come from no one 

 knows where, and trot about the waste 

 outside the village trees. They are the 

 spotted hyenas, tolerated by the Masai 

 because they are the living sepulchres of 

 their dead relations. When man, woman, 

 or child dies among the Masai, agricul- 

 tural or pastoral, the corpse is placed on 

 the outskirts of the settlement for the 

 hyenas to devour at nights. The cry of 

 the hyena is not a laugh, as people make 

 out, but a long-drawn falsetto wail end- 

 ing in a whoop. It sounds exactly like 

 what one might imagine to be the mock- 

 ing cry of a ghoul ; and but for the fact 

 that we now find that the ghoul myth has 

 a very solid human origin (since there 

 are depraved people all over Africa at the 

 present day who have a mania for eating 

 corpse-flesh, and this trait may also have 

 cropped out in pre-Mohammedan days in 

 Arabia and Persia), one might very well 

 imagine that the idea of the ghoul arose 

 from the hyena, as that of the harpy 

 probably did from the vulture. 



All these people are alike in their love 

 of blood as an article of food. They 

 periodically bleed their cattle and drink 

 the blood hot, or else mix it with por- 

 ridge. The women of these tribes do 

 not eat fowls, and neither men nor 

 women eat eggs. As among most negro 

 races, the men feed alone, and the women 

 eat after the men have done. 



