CHAPTER III 
THE EQUATORIAL TRENCH— {Continued) 
ON THE ENDERIT RIVER AND LAKE NAKURU 
Our camp on the Enderit River was surrounded by 
park-like country, alternating between bush and broad, 
open prairie, with part forest and glades of infinite 
beauty, while everywhere the landscape was bounded 
by the peaks and scaurs of distant mountains. 
Lovely as was our prospect, yet scarce a sign of its 
tropical site obtruded on 
the view, or proclaimed 
the fact that we ‘sat 
practically astride the 
equator. In these up¬ 
lands, the absence of 
such evidence is con¬ 
spicuous. Neither groves 
of graceful palms, with 
their troops of monkeys 
and flights of shrieking 
parrots, nor tree-ferns 
with feathery frondage, 
or other fantastic forms 
of foliage and plant-life 
such as one associates 
with the torrid zone, 
here arrest one’s gaze. On the contrary, the landscape 
of Enderit, as viewed afar, might well-nigh pass for a 
British scene—not, it is true, in the crowded south or 
the tame cultivation of the midlands, but rather amid 
those wilder regions of my own northern home, where 
Nature yet reigns unsubdued, unfenced, “ unimproved.” 
There, as here, a shaggy fringe of self-sown scrub or 
bush marks the course of winding burns ; natural woods 
18 
DRONGO. 
