No one had the least anxiety about the night. We quietly allowed the Moran[2] to bivouac near the camp. Our march through the wild highlands of the Wasotiko and the Wanandi had deadened our sense of such dangers. We could have no forebodings of the fierce struggle lasting for years that was yet to come between the English troops and those peoples, or imagine how warlike and skilled in self-defence they were. The presence of hundreds of spear- and club-armed warriors in the camp had become an almost daily experience, and great was the surprise of the English officers, later on, when they heard that the great caravan, which I had joined, had had the good fortune to pass through these districts without any fighting.
For me my serious illness had all at once interrupted the austere and wild delights of this life of the march and the caravan. But I had now become doubly responsive to the joys of travel amid light and air, freedom and endless space; doubly responsive also to the changing impressions derived from my week of marching through lonely primeval forests, bamboo thickets, and grassy plains—scenes in which, as my friend Richard Kandt, the discoverer of the source of the Nile, so strikingly remarks,[3] every plant, every stone, seems to cry out again to one in the vast solitude but one word: “The desert! the desert!”
C. G. Schillings, phot.
YOUNG MASAI DANCING AND SINGING NEAR MY CAMP.
In the early morning hours of January 15 there was a light continuous rainfall. A short march of only two hours brought us to our camping place on the shore of Lake Nakuro.
Far away extended the panorama of the lake, which lay before us filling its hollow bed, with its banks at this season of the year yielding fresh pastures to numberless herds of wild animals, and its waters affording rest and food to countless members of the feathered tribe. I had hardly ever seen greater numbers of the pretty little dwarf gazelles (Gazella thomsoni, Gthr.). Thousands and thousands more of these graceful creatures showed themselves on the fresh, green, grassy meadows of the lake margin, or scattered over its pebble beds of obsidian, augite, and pumice-stone. Wherever one turned one’s gaze it fell again and again upon these beautiful gazelles, which in many ways reminded one of wild goats at pasture, and were so strangely trustful that they often allowed the spectator to come quite close to them. Marked as are the colours of its hairy covering, the dwarf gazelle does not stand out boldly from the background, whether this be a plain blackened by bush-fires, or the mere bare ground, dun-coloured and brown, or land covered with soft green grass. But how clearly defined are its brown, black, and white, when we look closely at the hide of a specimen we have secured, or see it in a museum.
Darker spots in the distance far away from us we take to be larger wild animals. The field-glass shows that they are hartebeests, and a great number of waterbuck; and still farther off there is a moving mass that shimmers and is half lost in the glare of the morning sun. There are zebras, and yet more zebras, moving like living walls! Strange effects of light actually give us the impression of something like a wall or rampart, made up of the living forms of the zebras—the deep shadows they throw come out black, their flanks are lighted up in the dazzling sunshine, and they shimmer with all colours and with ever-changing effect.
Here by the lake we have the characteristic mark of the wilderness: dwarf gazelles and zebras, zebras and dwarf gazelles in greater and greater multitudes! Wherever the eye glances it falls upon these two species, and the numerous waterbuck and Grant’s gazelles, and the hundreds of hartebeests, are in a sense mere points of relief for the sight amidst these vast crowds. Bathed in the shimmering light this multitude of animals mingles together. Wherever I make my appearance there is for awhile movement in the mass of wild creatures, which otherwise are grazing quietly. I have long since left the camp a considerable distance behind me. I am following One of the rhinoceros—or hippopotamus—tracks leading to the lake margin, lost, so to speak, in this multitudinous animal life, and once more I have the feeling of finding myself, as it were, in the midst of a vast flock of sheep, and the impression that all the creatures about me are not “wild beasts,” but rather tame domestic animals that have been driven out here to graze on the pastures under the supervision of a herdsman.
