clambered to
points of vantage on rocks and the tops of small bushes: They all took
a good long look at me. Then they told me what they thought about me
personally, the fact of my being there, and the rude way I had startled
them. Their remarks were neither complimentary nor refined. The old
men, in especial, got quite profane, and screamed excited billingsgate.
Finally they all stopped at once, dropped on all fours, and loped away,
their ridiculous long tails curved in a half arc. Then for the first
time I noticed that, under cover of the insults, the women and children
had silently retired. Once more I was left to the familiar gentle bird
calls, and the vast silence of the wilderness beyond.

The second picture, also, was a view from a height, but of a totally
different character. It was also, perhaps, more typical of a greater
part of East Equatorial Africa. Four of us were hunting lions with
natives-both wild and tame-and a scratch pack of dogs. More of that
later. We had rummaged around all the morning without any results; and
now at noon had climbed to the top of a butte to eat lunch and look
abroad.

Our butte ran up a gentle but accelerating slope to a peak of big
rounded rocks and slabs sticking out boldly from the soil of the hill.
We made ourselves comfortable each after his fashion. The gunbearers
leaned against rocks and rolled cigarettes. The savages squatted on
their heels, planting their spears ceremonially in front of them. One
of my friends lay on his back, resting a huge telescope over his crossed
feet. With this he purposed seeing any lion that moved within ten miles.
None of the rest of us could ever make out anything through the fearsome
weapon. Therefore, relieved from responsibility by the presence of this
Dreadnaught of a 'scope, we loafed and looked about us. This is what we
saw:

Mountains at our backs, of course-at some distance; then plains in long
low swells like the easy rise and fall of a tropical sea, wave after
wave, and over the edge of the world beyond a distant horizon. Here and
there on this plain, single hills lay becalmed, like ships at sea; some
peaked, some cliffed like buttes, some long and low like the hulls of
battleships. The brown plain flowed up to wash their bases, liquid as
the sea itself, its tides rising in the coves of the hills, and ebbing
in the valleys between. Near at hand, in the middle distance, far away,
these fleets of the plain sailed, until at last hull-