CHAPTER XII 
ELMENTEITA 
(il) IN FEBRUARY 
Early in February 1906, eighteen months after the 
events described in the last chapter, we returned to 
Elmenteita, our primary object being to set out thence 
on an expedition among the Laikipia mountains, distant 
some seventy or eighty miles to the northward. Before 
starting, however, we intended to spend a few days at 
this point, renewing the happy memories of 1904. 
To all outward appearance, Elmenteita remained 
precisely as we had left it—the station, a tiny tin shanty 
standing utterly alone, a speck amidst boundless veld and 
prairie, across which runs that puny three-foot railway, 
a mere thread, over hill and dale. Great changes, never¬ 
theless, had occurred—changes that, as foreshadowing 
development in our new colony, one must regard with 
satisfaction, though in the breast of sportsman and 
naturalist a pang of regret will not be suppressed. 
The whole of the lands south of the railway line had 
meanwhile been sold to private owners, and we could 
only survey at a distance our erstwhile lovely hunting- 
grounds stretching away down the Enderit River to 
Lake Nakuru. True, the new owners were said to be 
obliging enough in granting leave to shoot—some even 
wanting the game destroyed ; but in Africa we ask no 
man’s leave, and it was to the north side we had come 
to turn our attention. 1 
1 Only a few months later we read in the Nairobi newspaper 
The Globe Trotter , that all the lands northward from the railway 
extending to Lake Elmenteita and beyond it to the escarpment, had 
likewise been sold—so rapid hereaway is the process of colonisation ! 
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