432 
ELEPHANT-HUNTING IN EAST AFRICA 
CHAP. 
weapons contrast strikingly with the short light bows and 
arrows used by most Central African natives. It must require 
great force to draw one of these formidable engines properly ; 
and one can well understand that those skilled in their use, 
with the additional aid of poison on the missile, may kill—as 
they say they do—both elephants and rhinoceroses without 
much difficulty. That both these animals frequent the river, 
especially during periods of drought, I had evidence in their 
tracks. Once I came upon quite fresh elephant spoor ; but as 
it was only of cows and calves I did not follow it. I might 
have done so, on the chance of finding a young bull or a cow 
worth shooting, but that I was lame at the time from my ankle 
(which had been sprained in my encounter with the elephant) 
having got worse again. 
As proof of how thoroughly inured to carrying their tusks 
my men had become, I may instance the march we made the 
day we left the river, when the distance to the first water was 
considerable. The entry for that day (26th September) runs 
as follows in my diary :—“ Got up at 2 A.M. and started at 
3.15. After four hours’ going waited for the ‘safari,’ but 
the men would not stop and we went on for another hour 
before resting, having thus done five hours’ solid marching 
without a halt. Then, after a fifteen minutes’ spell, did three 
hours more ; rested half an hour and on to camp, which the 
caravan reached at 1.45. Thus we did close on ten hours’ 
clear marching, the greater part of the way through dense bush, 
the narrow path often a good deal overhung.” 
At last, on 1st October, we once more entered Mombasa; 
and the men—decked in showy clothes, and headed by 
drummers hammering out, in perfect time, the regular “ safari ” 
beat—enjoyed the long-looked-forward-to parade through the 
streets. And a picturesque sight it is to see a string of 
porters, with gleaming ivory arcs on their shoulders, threading 
slowly the narrow streets, thronged with dusky but cleanly- 
clad onlookers ; the leading men jumping up and dancing 
