swamp, and desert, and the German
boundary.

We made a long march of it that first day, and camped after dark within
two miles of Kikuyu station. Most of the scrub thereabouts was castor
oil plant, that makes very poor fuel; yet there were lions in plenty
that roared and scouted around us even before the tents were pitched.

Nobody got much sleep that night, although the porters were perfectly
indifferent to the risk of snoozing on the watch. Kazimoto produced a
thing called a kiboko--a whip of hippopotamus-hide a yard and a half
long, and with the aid of that and Will's good humor we constituted a
yelling brigade, whose business was to make the welkin ring with
godless noises whenever a lion came close enough to be dangerous.

I made up a signal party of all our personal boys with our lanterns,
swinging them in frantic patterns in the darkness in a way to terrify
the very night itself. Fred played concertina nearly all night long,
and when dawn came, though there were tracks of lions all about the
camp we were only tired and sleepy. Nobody was missing; nobody killed.

We never again took lions so seriously, although we always built fires
about the camp in lion country when that was possible. Partly by dint
of carelessness that brought no ill results, and partly from
observation we learned that where game is plentiful lions are more
curious than dangerous, and that unless something should happen to
enrage them, or the game has gone away and they are hungry, they are
likely to let well alone.

If there are dogs in camp--and we bought three terrier pups that
morning from a settler at Kikuyu--leopards are likely to be more
troublesome than lions. The leopards seemed to yearn for dog-meat much
as Brown of Lumbwa yearned for whisky.

The journey to Lumbwa is one of the pleasantest I remember. We took
Brown's supply of whisky from him, locked up with our own, sent him
ahead in the hammock, and let him work as guide by promises of
whisky for supper if he did his duty, and threats of mere cold water if
he failed.

"But water rots my stomach!" he objected.

"Lead on, then!" was the invariable, remorseless answer. So Brown led
until we reached Naivasha with its strange lake full of hippo at an
elevation so great that the mornings are frosty (and that within sight
of the line). There was never a day that we were once out of sight of
game from dawn to dark. When we awoke the morning mist would scatter
slowly and