42 ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH [ch. ii 
from their house on the Mua Hills, with their guest, 
Selous, to take lunch. This, by the way, was after I 
had shot my first lions, and I was much pleased to be 
able to show Selous the trophies. 
My gentle-voiced hostess and her daughter had seen 
many strange lands and strange happenings, as was 
natural with a husband and father of such adventure- 
loving nature. They took a keen interest, untinged by 
the slightest nervousness, in every kind of wild creature, 
from lions and leopards down. The game w r as in sight 
from the veranda of the house almost every hour of the 
day. Early one morning, in the mist, three hartebeests 
came right up to the wire fence, two score yards from 
the house itself; and the black and white striped 
zebra and ruddy hartebeest grazed or rested through 
the long afternoons in plain view on the hillsides 
opposite. 
It is hard for one who has not himself seen it to 
realize the immense quantities of game to be found on 
the Kapiti Plains and Athi Plains and the hills that 
bound them. The common game of the plains, the 
animals of which I saw most while at Kitanga and in 
the neighbourhood, were the zebra, wildebeest, harte¬ 
beest, Grant’s gazelle, and “ tommies,” or Thomson’s 
gazelle ; the zebra and the hartebeest, usually known 
by the Swahili name of kongoni, being by far the most 
plentiful. Then there were impalla, mountain reed- 
buck, duyker, steinbuck, and diminutive dikdik. As 
we travelled and hunted, we were hardly ever out of 
sight of game; and on Pease’s farm itself there were 
many thousand head, and so there were on Slatter’s. 
If wealthy men, who desire sport of the most varied 
and interesting kind, would purchase farms like these, 
they could get, for much less money, many times the 
