iron--glass and cowrie--past the limit of desire.
There is peace from lake to mountain, and the very zebra breed
Where a law says none may hurt them (and the wise are they who heed!)
Yea--the peace lies on the country as our herds oerspread the plain--
But the days before the English--when shall those days come again!

When Kenia's peak glows gold and rose
A dawn breeze whispers to the plain
With breath cooled sweet by mountain snows--
"The darkness soon shall come again!"
Stirs then the sleepless, lean Masai
And stands o'er plain and peak at gaze
Resentful of the bright'ning sky,
Impatient of the white man's days.

What first looked like a pleasant place dwindled into charmlessness and
insignificance as we approached. There was neatness--of a kind. The
round huts were confined to certain streets, and all inhabited by
natives. Arabs, Swahili, Indians, Goanese, Syrians, Greeks and so on
had to live in rectangular huts and keep to other streets. On one
street, chiefly of stores, all the roofs were of corrugated iron. And
all the streets were straight, with shade trees planted down both sides
at exactly equal intervals.

But the German blight was there, instantly recognizable by any one not
mentally perverted by German teaching. The place was governed--existed
for and by leave of government. The inhabitants were there on
suffrance, and aware of it--not in the very least degree enthusiastic
over German rule, but awfully appreciative.

The first thing we met of interest on entering the township was a
chain-gang, fifty long, marching at top speed in step, led by a Nubian
soldier with a loaded rifle, flanked by two others, and pursued by a
fourth armed only with the hippo-hide whip, called kiboko by the
natives, that can cut and bruise at one stroke. He plied it liberally
whenever the gang betrayed symptoms of intending to slow down.

Those Nubiains, we learned later, were deserters from British Sudanese
regiments, and runaways from British jails, afraid to take the
thousand-mile journey northward home again, scornful of all foreign
black men, fanatic Muhammedans, and therefore fine tools in the German
hand. They worked harder than the chain-gang, for they had to march
with it step for step and into the bargain force it to do its appointed
labor. The chain-gang kept the township clean--very clean indeed, a