126 A BUFFALO HUNT [ch. vi 
herd of buffalo, numbering perhaps a hundred indi¬ 
viduals. They are semi-aquatic beasts, and their 
enormous strength enables them to plough through the 
mud and water and burst their way among the papyrus 
stems without the slightest difficulty, whereas a man is 
nearly helpless when once he has entered the reed-beds. 
They had made paths hither and thither across the 
swamp, these paths being three feet deep in ooze and 
black water. There were little islands in the swamp on 
which they could rest. Toward its lower end, where 
it ran into the Nairobi, the Kamiti emerged from the 
papyrus swamp and became a rapid brown stream of 
water, with only here and there a papyrus cluster along 
its banks. 
The Nairobi, which cut across the lower end of the 
farm, and the Rewero, which bounded it on the other 
side from the Kamiti, were as different as possible from 
the latter. Both were rapid streams broken by riffle 
and waterfall, and running at the bottom of tree-clad 
valleys. The Nairobi Falls, which were on Heatley’s 
Ranch, were singularly beautiful. Heatley and I visited 
them one evening after sunset, coming home from a 
day’s hunt. It was a ride I shall long remember. We 
left our men, and let the horses gallop. As the sun 
set behind us, the long lights changed the look of the 
country and gave it a beauty that had in it an element 
of the mysterious and the unreal. The mountains 
loomed both larger and more vague than they had been 
in the bright sunlight, and the plains lost their look 
of parched desolation as the afterglow came and went. 
We were galloping through a world of dim shade and 
dying colour; and, in this world, our horses suddenly 
halted on the brink of a deep ravine from out of which 
came the thunder of a cataract. We reined up on a 
