20 
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
medan negroes, clad like the askaris, reported to me as my 
gun-bearers, Muhamed and Bakari; seemingly excellent 
men, loyal and enduring, no trackers, but with keen eyes 
for game, and the former speaking a little English. My 
two horse boys, or saises, were both pagans. One, Hamisi, 
must have had in his veins Galla or other non-negro blood; 
derived from the Hamitic, or bastard Semitic, or at least 
non-negro, tribes which, pushing slowly and fitfully south¬ 
ward and south-westward among the negro peoples, have 
created an intricate tangle of ethnic and linguistic types 
from the middle Nile to far south of the equator. Hamisi 
always wore a long feather in one of his sandals, the only 
ornament he affected. The other sais was a silent, gentle- 
mannered black heathen; his name was Simba, a lion, 
and as I shall later show he was not unworthy of it. The 
two horses for which these men cared were stout, quiet 
little beasts; one, a sorrel, I named Tranquillity, and the 
other, a brown, had so much the coblike build of a zebra 
that we christened him Zebra-shape. One of Kermit’s 
two horses, by the way, was more romantically named after 
Huandaw, the sharp-eared steed of the Mabinogion. Cun- 
inghame, lean, sinewy, bearded, exactly the type of hunter 
and safari manager that one would wish for such an ex¬ 
pedition as ours, had ridden up with us on the train, and at 
the station we met Tarlton, and also two settlers of the 
neighborhood. Sir Alfred Pease and Mr. Clifford Hill. 
Hill was an Africander. He and his cousin, Harold Hill, 
after serving through the South African war, had come to 
the new country of British East Africa to settle, and they 
represented the ideal type of settler for taking the lead in the 
spread of empire. They were descended from the English 
