188 
IN AFRICA 
dwellers—all are part of a remarkable series of 
events that have nothing to do with an elephant 
story. In the forests we saw numberless old ele¬ 
phant pits, and on the grassy slopes there were 
mazes of elephants’ trails, some so big that hun¬ 
dreds of elephants must have moved along them. 
But we saw no elephants. We scanned the hills for 
miles and tramped for days in ideal elephant 
country, but our quest was all in vain. Then our 
food supplies ran low, our last bullock was killed, 
and we hurried back to the base camp on the river, 
a hungry, tired band of a hundred and twenty men. 
The matter of provisioning a large number of 
porters far from the railroad is a serious one. In 
addition to carrying the safari outfit, the porters 
must carry their posho or cornmeal ration, and 
it is impossible for them to carry more than a lim¬ 
ited number of days’ rations. So the farther one 
gets from the base of supplies the more difficult it 
is to move, and a relay system must be employed. 
Porters must be sent back for food, often six or 
eight days; or else a bullock wagon must be used 
for that purpose. In our safari we used two 
wagons, drawn by thirty oxen, to supplement the 
porters in keeping up food supplies, and even by so 
doing there were times when rations ran low. In 
such times we would shoot game for them, either 
kongoni or zebra, both of which are considered 
great delicacies by the black man. 
However, this is not telling about my memorable 
elephant experiences in the Guas Ngishu Plateau. 
