CHAPTER X 
ON SAFARI 
A SKETCH OF CAMP-LIFE IN BRITISH EAST AFRICA 
The amenities of camp-life vary with the latitude. 
Africa, the home of tent-dwellers, affords the ideal; 
Northern lands, too often, the reverse. Compare the 
rigours of life under canvas in subarctic regions— 
especially at high altitudes, as on the reindeer fjelds of 
Norway, or even in the low-lying forests of Sweden or 
Newfoundland. There each hunter is accompanied by 
but a single Achates, whose functions combine both those 
of gun-bearer by day, of cook and attendant by night. 
As darkness falls, one returns to an empty camp; fires 
must be lit—though rain descends in sheets—and dinner 
cooked ere the day’s work is complete. Comfort, or the 
semblance thereof, is rarely expected, still more rarely 
found. “ I doubled the Horn before the mast,” writes 
my brother, “ and that was no bed of roses in the old 
days of wind-jammers; but it was no whit more 
unendurable than a fortnight’s real bad weather under 
canvas on the high fjeld.” 
In Africa, on the other hand, tent-life is a normal 
condition, and the system and custom of camping in 
the open have been brought to the level of an art. 
Discomfort and trouble are, or ought to be, unknown. 
Before one’s arrival in Africa the whole safari has 
already been collected, trained men organised to take 
the field—these being mostly Swahilis. That word 
“ safari,” by the way, is quite untranslatable. It has 
no British equivalent, though in daily use on British 
territory, the usual rendering of “ caravan ” being equally 
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