WHERE ROOSEVELT WILL HUNT 



221 



Honey is a most important article of 

 diet of all the natives in this region. In 

 some districts they semi-domesticate the 

 wild bees by placing bark cylinders on 

 trees for them to build in. From honey 

 is made an intoxicating mead. They 

 also make a wine from the sap of the 

 wild date palm. Beer is made from the 

 grain of eleusine and sorghum. As a 

 general rule fermented liquors are never 

 drunk by the young unmarried women or 

 the young men. Both sexes and people 

 of all ages use tobacco in one form or 

 another. The fighting men take snuff, 

 the old married men chew tobacco, and 

 the old women smoke it. The Lumbwa 

 people make tobacco juice by keeping 

 macerated tobacco leaves soaked in water 

 in a goat horn slung round the neck. 

 Closing one nostril with a finger, they 

 tilt the head on one side, and then pour 

 the liquid tobacco juice out of the horn 

 into the other nostril. Both nostrils are 

 then pinched for a few minutes, after 

 which the liquid is allowed to trickle out. 



POISONED ARROWS 



The nomad Andorobo people, besides 

 killing innumerable colobus monkeys in 

 the dense woods of the Mau and Nandi 

 plateaux (with poisoned arrows), sally 

 out into the plains of the Rift Valley or 

 range over the opposite heights follow- 

 ing up the elephant, and attacking and 

 slaying most of the big antelope. They 

 kill the elephant very often by shooting 

 into its leg at close quarters a harpoon 

 with a detachable and strongly poisoned 

 head. The powerful arrow poison used 

 by the Andorobo and Masai is made 

 from the leaves and branches of A co- 

 cant her a schimperi. The leaves and 

 branches of this small tree are broken up 

 and boiled for about six hours. The 

 liquid is then strained and cleared of the 

 fragments of leaves and bark. They 

 continue to boil the poisoned water until 

 it is thick and viscid, by which time it 

 has a pitch-like appearance. The poison 

 is kept until it is wanted on sheets of 

 bark. After they have finished prepar- 

 ing the poison they carefully rub their 

 hands and bodies free from any trace of 



it with the fleshy, juicy leaves of a kind 

 of sage. 



The poison is always kept high up on 

 the forks of trees out of the reach of 

 children, and the poisoned arrows are 

 never kept in the people's huts, but are 

 stowed away in branches. When a beast 

 has been shot with these arrows, it dies 

 very quickly. The flesh just around the 

 arrowhead is then cut out and thrown 

 away, but all the rest of the beast is 

 eaten and its blood is drunk. 



All these peoples use dogs in hunting, 

 and before starting for the chase they 

 are said to give their dogs a drug which 

 makes them fierce. They also catch 

 birds with bird-lime. The Nandi go out 

 in large numbers to hunt, surround a 

 herd of game in a circle, and then ap- 

 proach the animals near enough to kill 

 them with arrows and spears. 



The people who inhabit the eastern 

 fringe of the plateau develop the fashion 

 of the earring to a considerable ex- 

 tent. They begin when children to 

 pierce a hole in the lobe of the ear 

 through which they first pass a stick of 

 wood the size of a match. This is in- 

 creased in thickness until they succeed 

 in stretching the lobe in the course of 

 years into a huge loop. It is interest- 

 ing to know that in some of the old 

 Egyptian accounts of the Land of Punt 

 (which we take to be somewhere near 

 Somaliland, in northeast Africa), they 

 mentioned people with ears that hung 

 down to their shoulders. Obviously 

 they are describing the people of Somali- 

 land as they existed 3,000 or 4,000 years 

 ago. Some of them have a physiog- 

 nomy rather similar to the Hamitic peo- 

 ple of the north, not altogether negroes. 



GRAND SCENERY OE THE RlFT VALLEY 



The hills of the termites, or "white 

 ants," are not only familiar in their gen- 

 eral outline to all who have visited tropi- 

 cal Africa, but even to the untraveled 

 reader of books describing African ex- 

 ploration. Therefore even the uninitiated 

 would be struck by the extraordinary 

 height and formation of the termite hills 

 round about the Baringo district. This 



