A TRIP TO TAVRITA. 
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sulas of forest-clad mounds and hillocks, on which one 
longs to go and build a little hut and live for ever; 
sometimes flows solemnly and slowly with glassy look 
amid winding avenues of palms, acacias, albizzias, 
sterculias, parinariums, sycamores, and wild bananas’, 
through the stately architecture of a vegetable Venice. 
Here are places where the river broadens out into 
shallows, and the banks slope down in turfy lawns or 
stretches of sparkling sand to the water’s edge; there 
you may emerge from your bath on natural quays of 
smooth and polished stone, most grateful to the naked 
feet that shrink from gritty pebbles or thorny, 
prickly, tangled weeds. 
The River Lumi, which flows through Taveita and 
creates all its luxuriant forest, is uninhabited by noxious 
creatures, such as crocodiles or leeches, and only 
harbours harmless fish, that are good to eat, or great 
timid varanus lizards, who never interfere with one’s 
bathing. Its water is exquisitely cool, clear, and sweet, 
and comes from the snows of Kilima-njaro. 
Here and there amid the lofty aisles of the Taveitan 
forest are little clearings, pretty homesteads of yellow 
beehive huts, neat plots of cultivated ground, groves 
of emerald-green bananas, which are the habitations of 
the happy Arcadians who have made this tropical para¬ 
dise their home. They were once miserable refugees 
who sought asylum and concealment in the impene¬ 
trable forest which even now girds their colony with 
a belt of closely growing trunks and thickly inter- 
knitted mesh of creeping stems. In this leafy laby¬ 
rinth they were screened from the outside world they 
dreaded—from the cruel pursuits of the raiding Masai. 
On the few occasions when these robbers have tried to 
penetrate the maze of forest, the Taveitans, knowing 
