er feet, but the bushes
served as a kind of mattress and the captain escaped with only a few
hones broken; although he was laid up for five weeks. Ashton and Black
did not have much luck in the present trip and failed to get a single
lion.

Two Spaniards passed our camp one day, inward bound. They were the Duke
of Penaranda and Sr. de la Huerta, and reported no lions during their
few days in the district. Prince Lichtenstein was also somewhere on the
plateau, but we didn't run across him. In addition to these three
parties and ours, the only other expedition in the Guas Ngishu Plateau
was Colonel Roosevelt's party, toward which, by previous agreement, we
made our way.

A number of months before Mr. Akeley, who headed our party, was dining
with President Roosevelt at the White House. In the course of their
talk, which was about Africa and Mr. Akeley's former African hunting and
collecting experiences, the latter had told the president about a group
of elephants that he was going to collect and mount for the American
Museum of History in New York. President Roosevelt was asked if he would
cooeperate in the work, and he expressed a keen willingness to do so.
When our party arrived at Nairobi, in September, a letter awaited Mr.
Akeley, renewing Colonel Roosevelt's desire to help in collecting the
group.

It was in answer to this invitation that Mr. Akeley and our party had
gone to the Mount Elgon country to meet Mr. Roosevelt and carry out the
elephant-hunting compact made many months before at the White House.

[Photograph: Kermit, Leslie Tarlton and Colonel Roosevelt]

[Photograph: Winding Through Unbroken Country]

[Photograph: Our Safari on the March]

Eleven days of marching and hunting from the railroad brought us to
Sergoi, the very uttermost outpost of semi-civilization. Here we found
another letter in which Mr. Akeley was asked to come to the Roosevelt
camp, and which suggested that a native runner could pilot him to its
whereabouts. The letter had been written some days before and had been
for some time at Sergoi. Whether the Roosevelt camp had been moved in
the meantime could not be determined at Sergoi, and we knew only in a
general way that it was probably somewhere on the Nzoia River
(pronounced Enzoya), two or three days' march west of Sergoi, toward
Mount Elgon.

So we started across, meeting no natives who possibly could have given
any information. On the afternoon of November thirteenth we went i