A LION-DRIVE 
47 
placed I knew not, nor could they tell where we two 
were. While the beat progressed I heard some large 
animal approaching, heard it arrive in the thicket 
immediately on my front, and stop there. In vain I 
looked around for a convenient tree to ascend, not so 
much from fear of a lion as from the risk of promiscuous 
bullets. Trees there were in plenty, but not one could 
be climbed by reason of the pendent masses of parasitic 
plants and prehensile thorny creepers with which each 
trunk was clad. As the beaters came in the beast broke. 
It was only a bushbuck; no one fired. But with careless 
guns there would have been more danger from stray 
bullets than from the most savage beast that roams the 
African forest. The evening ended in backsheesh. The 
“ boys ’’asked for twopence each. I served out thrice 
that sum, and posed as a benefactor. Next morning we 
started on the long march to Lake Baringo. 
A curious incident deserves record. At the station at 
Nakuru was posted a written notice that (presumably by 
reason of some small trouble with the natives) sportsmen 
were forbidden to proceed “ north of the equator,” which, 
the notice added, “ might be taken as passing over Molo 
bridge.” Now to me the equator had always been a sort 
of abstraction—not a concrete thing capable of passing 
over a bridge, like a donkey or a telegraph-wire. Hence 
I had mistaken the notice for some tropical joke ! 
Fortunately for us, being that night in the august 
company of the Government, the error was discovered 
in time and the necessary permit issued. 
