11 2 
NAIROBI AND MT. KENYA 
hyenas, tolerated by the Masai because they are the living sepulchres 
of their dead relations. When man, woman or child dies among the 
Masai, agricultural or pastoral, the corpse is placed on the outskirts 
of the settlement for the hyenas to devour at nights. The cry of the 
hyena is not a laugh, as people make out, but a long-drawn falsetto 
wail ending in a whoop. It sounds exactly like what one might imagine 
to be the mocking cry of a ghoul; and but for the fact that we now find 
that the ghoul myth has a very solid human origin (since there are 
depraved people all over Africa at the present day who have a mania 
for eating corpse-flesh, and this trait may also have cropped out in pre- 
Mohammedan days in Arabia and Persia), one might very well im¬ 
agine that the idea of the ghoul arose from the hyena, as that of the 
harpy probably did from the vulture. 
“All these people are alike in their love of blood as an article of 
food. They periodically bleed their cattle and drink the blood hot, or 
else mix it with porridge. The women of these tribes do not eat fowls, 
and neither men nor women eat eggs. As among most negro races, 
the men feed alone, and the women eat after the men have done. 
“Honey is a most important article of diet of all the natives in 
this region. In some districts they semi-domesticate the wild bees by 
placing bark cylinders on trees for them to build in. From honey is 
made an intoxicating mead. They also make a wine from the sap of 
the wild date palm. Beer is made from the grain of eleusine and sor¬ 
ghum. As a general rule fermented liquors are never drunk by the 
young unmarried women or the young men. Both sexes and people 
of all ages use tobacco in one form or another. The fighting men take 
snuff, the old married men chew tobacco, and the old women smoke it. 
The Lumbwa people make tobacco juice by keeping macerated tobacco 
leaves soaked in water in a goat horn slung round the neck. Closing 
one nostril with a finger, they tilt the head on one side, and then pour 
the liquid tobacco juice out of the horn into the other nostril. Both 
nostrils are then pinched for a few minutes, after which the liquid is 
allowed to trickle out. 
“The nomad Andorobo people, besides killing innumerable col- 
obus monkeys in the dense woods of the Mau and Nandi plateaux 
(with poisoned arrows), sally out into the plains of the Rift Valley 
