80 THE MELON OF THE KALAHARI DESERT 
it among the plants : this I did with most successful results, 
for no more plants died and a fair number of melons came to 
maturity, but the effects upon the local chickens who frequented 
my garden, although satisfactory from my point of view, were 
'fatal to them. Possibly I had put too much Paris green with 
the bran ; however, I am afraid it is not practicable to sprinkle 
the Athi Plains all over with bran and Paris green, and unless 
the sama are able to hold their own against insect pests in the 
struggle for existence the acclimatisation experiments with 
the Kalahari melon will not be very successful. 
It will be interesting after the next rains to see whether the 
seeds from the melons grown at Simba and Sultan Hamud will 
germinate naturally and grow a crop. If this takes place it 
may reasonably be hoped that they will form a nucleus and 
gradually spread over the surrounding waterless country, and 
from them acclimatised seeds may be obtained and planted in 
other parts of the Protectorate. 
There is one other point of interest concerning the growth 
of the sama which I noticed from the seeds planted in my 
garden, and that is the very long period which elapsed between 
the time that the seeds were planted and the appearance of 
the plants. It was nearly two months and a half after the 
seeds were planted in my garden that the plants appeared, 
and nearly a month later several more plants came up. This 
is a very interesting point, because the natives in the Kalahari 
say that all the sama seeds do not grow every year, but that 
some lie on the ground for two or three years and then grow, 
the object of this being to prevent the extermination of the 
species through drought and to make the utmost use of the 
rains. It is possible that sama seed germinates only after it 
is two or three years old or even more, and in this case there 
would always be seeds in varying stages of ripeness lying on 
the ground, some only of which would grow when rain came, 
and if such rain was out of season or premature or only of short 
duration, and the young plants which came up were consequently 
unable to come to maturity, there would still be left ample 
seeds ready to spring up during the real rainy season, and the 
species would not die out as would have been the case if all the 
seeds had germinated at once, for the sama plant only grows 
