THE ISLAND OF MOMBASA 
S3 
days until we should be up against the “real thing.” 
I sometimes wondered how I should act with a hos¬ 
tile lion in front of me—whether I would become 
panic-stricken or whether my nerve would hold 
true. There is lots of food for reverie when one is 
going against big game for the first time. 
We landed at Mombasa September sixteenth, 
seventeen days out from Naples. 
Mombasa is a little island about two by three 
miles in extent. It is riotous with brilliant vegeta¬ 
tion, and, as seen after a long sea voyage through 
the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, it looks heavenly 
except for the heat. Hundreds of great baobab 
trees with huge, bottle-like trunks and hundreds of 
broad spreading mango trees give an effect of 
tropical luxuriance that is hardly to be excelled in 
beauty anywhere in the East. Large ships that stop 
at the island usually wind their course through a 
