6 
ON SAFAKI 
Yet it was precisely the lack of these necessaries (in 
the carriage beside me) that proved my undoing. 
The Uganda railway, after traversing the 100-mile 
coast-belt—the low-lying, malarial Taru desert—at once 
ascends to the highland plateaux beyond. During 
that first night’s journey the traveller is carried up to 
nearly 4,000 ft. above sea-level, and into a temperature 
that, by comparison, chills with a marrow-piercing cold. 
At sundown you are melting; before midnight, frozen. 
When darkness closes in the scene is truly tropical : 
there are palms, bananas, papyrus and the rest. When 
daylight dawns it reveals bramble and bracken, sometimes 
even hoar-frost. 
This night-cold cuts to the bone —unless one is 
O 
provided with the simple necessary wraps, in my case 
overlooked. The result was an internal chill, followed 
by colic, terminating in fever. 
Cruel was the disappointment. Already, while 
traversing the Athi Plains, we had witnessed the abund¬ 
ance of wild game, and keenness to get among them 
passed all bounds ; yet now, for a weary fortnight, I 
was held up with fever and a temperature anywhere 
around 106 degrees. Lucky, indeed, that this occurred 
at Nairobi, where there was a medico of sorts, rough 
though kindly, and where prescriptions were (in those 
days) dispensed in empty beer-bottles. Nairobi’s single 
wood-built hotel of that epoch (since burnt out), run on 
the usual free-and-easy colonial lines, compares not with 
the palatial structures of the modern capital (things 
move fast thereaway), yet was thoroughly comfortable. 
More than that, at the hands of the two Miss Eaynes— 
busy as they were with a thousand more important 
things—I received during this illness a care and attention 
that will ever remain a grateful memory. 
Meanwhile, within an afternoon’s walk of the town, 
my brother Walter had found abundant game—harte- 
beests and zebra, gazelles, ostrich, cranes and bustard— 
and had already opened our score. But, so soon as the 
crisis of the fever had passed, he left me and went on 
