338 
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
to be gun-bearer. In his place he had taken as camera 
bearer an equally powerful porter, a heathen ’Mnuwazi 
named Mali. His tent boy had gone crooked; and one 
evening some months later after a long and trying march he 
found Mali, whose performance of his new duties he had 
been closely watching, the only man up; and Mali, always 
willing, turned in of his own accord to help get Kermif s 
tent in shape; so Kermit suddenly told him he would pro¬ 
mote him to be tent boy. At first Mali did not quite under¬ 
stand; then he pondered a moment or two, and suddenly 
leaped into the air exclaiming in Swahili, ‘‘Now I am a big 
man.’’ And he faithfully strove to justify his promotion. 
In similar fashion Kermit picked out on the Nairobi race¬ 
track a Kikuyu sais named Magi, and brought him out 
with us. Magi turned out the best sais in the safari; and 
besides doing his own duty so well he was always exceed¬ 
ingly interested in everything that concerned his own 
Bwana, Kermit, or me—from the proper arrangement of 
our sunpads to the success of our shooting. 
From the giraffe camp we went two days’ journey to 
the ’Nzoi River. Until this Uasin Gishu trip we had been 
on waters which either vanished in the desert or else flowed 
into the Indian Ocean. Now we had crossed the divide, 
and were on the Nile side of the watershed. The ‘Nzoi, a 
rapid muddy river, passing south of Mount Elgon, empties 
into the Victoria Nyanza. Our route to its bank led across 
a rolling country, covered by a dense growth of tall grass, 
and in most places by open thorn scrub, while here and 
there, in the shallow valleys or depressions, were swamps. 
There were lions, and at night we heard them; but in such 
long grass it was wellnigh hopeless to look for them. Evi- 
