THE MOUNT ELGON COUNTRY 
277 
about in a sea of waving grass for miles and miles, 
and getting more and more hopelessly lost, we 
stumbled upon signs of human habitation. The first 
sign was a great stretch of valley in which a number 
of smoke columns were ascending. Where there's 
smoke there's folk, we thought, patting ourselves 
on the back for cleverness. We knew we were ap¬ 
proaching fresh eggs and chickens. 
A little later we came upon another sign of hu¬ 
man agitation. Over a rise in a hill we saw a large 
spear, and in a few minutes we overhauled a native 
guarding a herd of cattle. He carried a spear and 
a shield, and over his shoulders he wore a loose 
dressing sack that hung down nearly to his arm- 
pits. Civilization had touched him lightly, in fact 
it had barely waved at him as it brushed by. 
We tried him with several languages—Swahili, 
Kikuyu, the language of flowers, American, Masai, 
and the sign language, none of which he was con¬ 
versant with. Then we tried a relay system of dia¬ 
lects which established a vague, syncopated kind 
of intellectual contact. One of our porters spoke 
Kavirondo, so he held converse with the far from 
handsome stranger, translated it into Swahili, and 
this was retranslated into English for our benefit. 
The stranger was a Ketosh. We didn’t know 
what a Ketosh was, but it sounded more like some¬ 
thing in the imperative mood than anything ethno¬ 
logical. It developed later in the day, however, that 
a Ketosh is a member of the tribe of that name, and 
their habitat is on the southern slopes of Elgon. 
