28 THE MELON OF THE KALAHARI DESERT 
been particularly plentiful, neither horses nor oxen would drink 
the water, which happened to be, for an exception, particularly 
good and fresh. 
I myself and a friend who accompanied me used the sama 
on many occasions. By cutting it up into lumps and boiling 
it in a pot it appears to melt ; the fibrous and more solid parts 
can then be strained out and the syrupy liquid which remains 
can be used for making tea, porridge, and boiling meat — to 
which it gives rather a pleasant sweetish flavour. 
Sama tea I cannot honestly recommend — it gives one the 
sensation of being what the Dutch call ‘ dik,’ and one has 
no inclination for either food or drink for about twenty-four 
hours afterwards, as well as other less pleasant sensations. 
When necessary I always eat it raw, and in this way a white 
man, provided he does not walk about too much in the hot 
sun, can sustain life on sama, but it is not a pleasant experience, 
and one is conscious of a continual desire for a good long 
drink. But the Bushmen can live for months with no water 
other than sama . 
With regard to the acclimatisation experiments which I 
have rather neglected so far, it occurred to me that it would 
be of great value and interest if this wild melon could be 
introduced into the Southern Game Reserve in British East 
Africa, for, as all of you probably know, during the dry season 
the greater part of the Athi Plains across to the German border 
is extremely waterless, in fact in bad drought years the 
Southern Game Reserve becomes a veritable Kalahari desert, 
and I thought that if this wild melon would grow there it 
would help very considerably to solve the problem of water 
and food for the game and also for the Masai cattle — for it is 
both. I therefore, after considerable difficulty, obtained from 
a friend in Bechuanaland about 10 lb. of sama seed from the 
Kalahari. It arrived in good condition and was planted over 
a considerable area of the Reserve in October 1911, but the 
rains, although fairly plentiful in some parts of the Protectorate, 
were almost a failure over this area of the Game Reserve, and 
no sign was to be found of the sama. 
At the same time I gave some seed to Mr. C. A. Hill of 
Machakos, who planted it on his farm. At first he told me that 
