ROGER.
From the same to the same.
Mwada,
The Happy Valley,
July 28, 1891.
MY OWN DEAR WIFE,—
I reached the shores of the lake—which I now find is called Lawa ya mweri—and the end of the Happy Valley on—as near as I can reckon—June 20. (The Stotts have no almanacs and are quite indifferent to dates, times, seasons; they live under some enchantment, they tell me, since they came here, like the legends of people carried off to Fairyland.) I met Mr. Stott at Burungi, which now looks a flourishing station. The Wagogo seem to me quite recalcitrant to Christianity, but the Stotts have to keep this up as a depôt for their traffic with the coast, and they are helped in this by the German Government.... Stott and I journeyed together through the Irangi country almost in state. The Stotts have become enormously popular as "medicine men." They have stopped epidemics of small-pox by vaccinating the people, have shown them how to stay the ravages of the burrowing fleas, and they are making a dead set against infanticide, having found one or two leading chiefs sufficiently intelligent to appreciate the importance of a large population. Formerly, as you may remember, there was such a prejudice against female babies that they were often exposed to the hyenas outside the tembe, and all children who came into the world by an irregular presentation, or with a tooth already through the gum, likewise all twins, were either thrown into the lake or abandoned to the carnivorous ants or prowling carnivores. (There is a curious legend here—Stott says—that sometimes these unhappy infants were picked up by female baboons of the Chakma type and nursed by them with their own offspring.)
Well: you can imagine, having lived already in these parts, what the infant death-rate amounted to. But the local chiefs having had the whole theory exposed to them have sanctioned a crusade against infanticide for any reason. The Wa-rangi have further been persuaded to abandon the custom of burning alive women suspected of adultery. I did not like to tell you at the time, but as we passed through the Irangi country in November, '88, they were actually killing unfortunate women in this manner. They believe that if a man goes out hunting and makes a bad miss in throwing his spear or assegai at an elephant it is because his wife is untrue to him at home! So when he returns from the chase his wretched spouse is trussed up and bound to the top of a great pile of brushwood.
Consequently, at several of the Irangi villages on our way up the Bubu valley the women who were the wives of sporting duffers came out in deputations to dance round the worthy Stott till they quite embarrassed him; especially as the dances were of an indelicate nature.
The Stotts have now quite a nice-looking station to the south-east of the main lake, on a grassy rise with the Mburu river on the south and a much smaller salt lake on the east. This looks like sparkling ice under the sun and is nearly solid—? salt—? soda. Its borders seem to be a kind of salt lick for the game which is once more swarming and singularly tame. There are no rhinos, fortunately, and the tricky tempered elephants and buffaloes prefer the wooded regions farther north and west. The lions, leopards and chitas are so glutted with food that they leave the domestic cattle and human beings alone; and the myriad zebras, antelopes, elands, bushbuck, giraffes, wart-hogs and ostriches are quite willing to live at peace with mankind. Secretary birds and saddle-billed storks are numerous and keep the snakes down; marabou storks and vultures devour all the carrion and even the filth round the native villages—so the country seems healthy. Enormous flocks of crowned cranes and bustards look after the locusts and grasshoppers. The flamingoes by the lake shore are as numerous as they were in our time....