African Game Trails 
143 
and of course especially my tent-boys, gun- 
bearers, and saises, who quite touched me 
by their evident pleasure in coming to see 
me and greet me if I happened to be away 
from them for two or three days. 
Ivermit and I rode off with Heatley to pass 
the night at his house. This was at the 
other end of his farm, in a totally different 
kind of country, a country of wooded hills, 
with glades and dells and long green grass 
in the valleys. It did not in the least re¬ 
semble what one would naturally expect in 
equatorial Africa. On the contrary it re¬ 
minded me of the beautiful rolling wooded 
country of middle Wisconsin. But of course 
everything was really different. There were 
monkeys and leopards in the forests, and 
we saw whydah birds of a new kind, with 
red on the head and throat, and brilliantly 
colored woodpeckers, and black-and-gold 
weaver-birds. Indeed, the wealth of bird 
life was such that it cannot be described. 
Here, too, there were many birds with musi¬ 
cal voices, to which we listened in the early 
morning. The best timber was yielded by 
the tall mahogo tree, a kind of sandalwood. 
This was the tree selected by the wild fig for 
its deadly embrace. The wild fig begins as 
a huge parasitic vine, and ends as one of the 
largest and most stately, and also one of 
.the greenest and most shady, trees in this 
part of Africa. It grows up the mahogo as a 
vine and gradually, by branching, and by the 
spreading of the branches, completely en¬ 
velops the trunk and also grows along each 
limb, and sends out great limbs of its own. 
Every stage can be seen, from that in which 
the big vine has begun to grow up along 
the still flourishing mahogo, through that 
in which the tree looks like a curious com¬ 
posite, the limbs and thick foliage of the fig 
branching out among the limbs and scanty 
foliage of the still living mahogo, to the stage 
in which the mahogo is simply a dead skele¬ 
ton seen here and there through the trunk 
or the foliage of the fig. Finally nothing 
remains but the fig, which grows to be a 
huge tree. 
Heatley’s house was charming, with its 
vine-shaded veranda, its summer-house 
and out-buildings, and the great trees clus¬ 
tered round about. He was fond of sport in 
the right way, that is, he treated it as sport 
and not business, and did not allow it to in¬ 
terfere with his prime work of being a suc¬ 
cessful farmer. He had big stock-yards for 
his cattle and swine, and he was growing all 
kinds of things of both the temperate and 
the tropic zones: wheat and apples, coffee 
and sugar-cane. The bread we ate and the 
coffee we drank were made from what he 
had grown on his own farm. There were 
roses in the garden and great bushes of 
heliotrope by the veranda, and the drive ta 
his place was bordered by trees from Aus¬ 
tralia and beds of native flowers. 
Next day we went in to Nairobi, where 
we spent a most busy week, especially the 
three naturalists; for the task of getting into 
shape for shipment and then shipping the 
many hundreds of specimens—indeed, all 
told there were thousands of specimens— 
was of herculean proportions. Governor 
Jackson—a devoted ornithologist and prob¬ 
ably the best living authority on East African 
birds, taking into account the stand-points, 
of both the closet naturalist and the 
field naturalist—spent hours with Mearns, 
helping him to identify and arrange the 
species. 
Nairobi is a very attractive town, and 
most interesting, with its large native quar¬ 
ter and its Indian colony. One of the streets 
consists of little except Indian shops and 
bazaars. Outside the business portion,, 
the town is spread over much territory, 
the houses standing isolated, each by itself,, 
and each usually bowered in trees, with 
vines shading the verandas, and pretty 
flower-gardens round about. Not only da 
I firmly believe in the future of East Africa 
for settlement as a white man’s country, but 
I feel that it is an ideal playground alike for 
sportsmen, and for travellers who wish to 
live in health and comfort, and yet to see 
what is beautiful and unusual. 
