with the camp-fires burning and with our tents almost buried
in the tall grass, we celebrated Thanksgiving in a way that must have
made old Lucullus fidget in his mausoleum. The wealth of the plains was
compelled to yield tribute to our table; eland, grouse and Uganda cob
appeared and disappeared as if by magic; the vast storehouses of Europe
and America poured their treasures upon our groaning board, and one by
one we safely put away succulent lengths of asparagus, cakes and
chocolate, wine and olives, pickles and honey, nuts and cheese, plum
pudding and coffee, and soup and salad, all in their proper sequence and
in sufficient quantities to go round and round.

A soft moon shone down from the velvet sky and the trees of the river
bed were bathed in white moonlight as we sat by the great camp-fire and
smoked and talked and dreamed of the folk at home.

It was an unusual occasion, one that called for a special dispensation
in the way of late hours, so it was almost nine when we turned in and
dreamed of armies of rhinos playing battledore and shuttlecock with our
bulging forms. It was a great dinner, and to be on the safe side we
complimented the cook before we went to bed.

[Photograph: A Group of Ketosh Ladies]

[Photograph: Nearly Buried in Grass]

[Photograph: Building a Grass House]

A day or two later, after blindly floundering about in a sea of waving
grass for miles and miles, and getting more and more hopelessly lost, we
stumbled upon signs of human habitation. The first sign was a great
stretch of valley in which a number of smoke columns were ascending.
Where there's smoke there's folk, we thought, patting ourselves on the
back for cleverness. We knew we were approaching fresh eggs and
chickens.

A little later we came upon another sign of human agitation. Over a rise
in a hill we saw a large spear, and in a few minutes we overhauled a
native guarding a herd of cattle. He carried a spear and a shield, and
over his shoulders he wore a loose dressing sack that hung down nearly
to his armpits. Civilization had touched him lightly, in fact it had
barely waved at him as it brushed by.

We tried him with several languages--Swahili, Kikuyu, the language of
flowers, American, Masai, and the sign language, none of which he was
conversant with. Then we tried a relay system of dialects which
established a vague, syncopated kind of intellectual contact. One of our
porters spoke Kavirondo, so he held converse wit