But in this he was mistaken, for when he came some weeks later to enter into occupation of his estate, the goat was brought to him with every mark of respect by a deputation of the villagers.
[CHAPTER THE FIFTH--Juma takes to the Bush]
Mr. Halliday spent the next two days in surveying the neighbourhood of Mr. Gilmour's stake. The country was all that his friend had described. The soil was rich; the river, as the natives informed him, never ran dry, though its waters were sometimes very low; and the valley was intersected by several smaller watercourses, which, though now dry, were full streams in the rainy season, so that the estate would never lack irrigation except after long-continued drought. Being well satisfied with the locality, Mr. Halliday got his men to erect a number of boundary posts about a rectangular area of some 1,500 acres, and then set off on the return journey to Nairobi to lodge a claim for a Government grant in the office of the District Commissioner. He paid his preliminary survey fee of seventy-five rupees; then, knowing that it would be months before the official survey was made, he decided to purchase stores, stock, and material for building a bungalow and out-houses, and to engage porters to convey these to the spot, and a certain number of servants to staff the farm. Formal possession of the land would be granted as soon as it was certified to be actually occupied and the balance of the survey fee, some two hundred rupees, was paid; but the lease for ninety-nine years would not be made out until the Commissioner received proof that development had taken place, which practically meant the expenditure of forty times the rent, this being twelve cents an acre. Thus it would be about three years before Mr. Halliday was definitely accepted as a settler and leaseholder, and he impressed upon John that they must both put their backs into the work if they intended to be successful.
It was a month before the second safari was ready to start--a far more important caravan than the first. To begin with, there was a large quantity of stores for the use of the white men, together with seeds, root plants, and a few apple-tree slips, which by all accounts would thrive. Then there was a considerable amount of thin corrugated iron for roofing, some glass, and some ready-made window-frames, which if made on the spot would have involved too great an expenditure of time and labour. There were a few simple agricultural implements which Mr. Halliday had brought from home, guessing, and rightly as it proved, that even allowing for the cost of freight they were cheaper than they could have been bought in Nairobi. These included the "small holdings plough" of Ipswich, which had to be taken to pieces for convenience of transit. Mr. Halliday deplored the lack of roads and of bridges over the streams, which made it impossible to employ vehicles for the carriage of his goods, and prevented him from taking several pieces of machinery he would have liked to have with him. But he purchased a few donkeys, each of which could carry twice as much as a man.
In addition to these articles, a large number of live-stock was included in the caravan. It might be possible, Mr. Halliday was told, to purchase cattle and sheep from the natives in the neighbourhood of his farm, but he was advised to buy a good number of half-bred animals in Nairobi, the native sheep and goats being woolless, and of no value except for their flesh and hides. Later on, when he was fairly settled, he hoped to introduce some English stock to cross with the native. Accordingly he bought 750 sheep at an average price of six shillings a head, a few goats, and a score of cattle, for which he paid £140.
To carry his goods he found it necessary to engage, in addition to the donkeys, forty porters, a few of whom he intended to keep as labourers on the farm or servants in the house, if they proved satisfactory. Of these forty only one, Coja the headman, had been a member of the first expedition, the rest of that party being unwilling to do any more work until they had spent their wages. Twelve of the new company were Swahilis, the remainder Wakamba or Wakikuyu. Four of the Swahilis were askaris, or armed porters. Said Mohammed had done so well on the first journey that he was engaged permanently as cook. John declared that his conversation was well worth his wages, but Mr. Halliday took severely practical views of everything, and said that he didn't pay for conversation. He hired two Indian mistris for three months, at two rupees a day, to build his bungalow and do what other carpenter's work was necessary. And since his farm was to be mainly a stock-farm, he engaged a stalwart Masai and his son, a lad of sixteen or seventeen, to assist in the herding, the Masai being a pastoral race par excellence.
Mr. Halliday had not intended to increase his men's burdens on this occasion by "trade" goods, thinking that the friendship he had already sealed with the chief of the neighbouring village would obviate any further dealings with the natives. But he changed his mind on the advice of Mr. Gillespie, who represented that he might come in contact with other tribes not so well disposed, that he might find it necessary to purchase more sheep and cattle, especially if tick fever or some other disease broke out among his stock, and that it would be well to have the means of purchasing ivory, if he found an opportunity, the tribes to the north of Kenya being reputed great elephant hunters.
All being at last ready, Mr. Halliday set out on his second journey, which took him nearly four times as long as the first, owing partly to a certain turbulence among the Swahili porters, and partly to the difficulty of driving the animals. Apart from their natural tendency to lag and to stray, it was a difficult and sometimes a perilous operation to get them across the many streams; fortunately it was the height of the dry season, and the depth of water insignificant. Several sheep were drowned, some strayed and could not be recovered; one or two died of over-marching. The donkeys also gave a good deal of trouble, having to be unloaded at every stream, lugged across, and then loaded up again. It was a long and tiresome business each night to construct a boma of sufficient circuit to enclose the whole of the safari, and in spite of this thorny fence, and watchfires kept constantly alight, a lion on one occasion broke in at dead of night, snapped up a sheep, and made off with it before the alarm could be given.
Mr. Halliday found the porters even more troublesome than the animals. It turned out that one of the Swahilis was an old rival of Coja ben Selim. He was a big man named Juma, with a stronger strain of Arab blood than the rest, and he constantly disputed Coja's authority, and incited the other men to complain of their loads and their food. Mr. Halliday had to be continually on the watch, and only by dint of great firmness and by keeping Juma on one occasion without food for a day did he succeed in preventing a mutiny. Juma had brought his wife with him, a very stout negress of some Bantu race; or rather, she had attached herself to the expedition when it had marched some ten miles out of Nairobi, and resolutely refused to leave. Her presence proved to be rather an advantage than otherwise, for once when Mr. Halliday had found it necessary to give Juma a stern reprimand, the woman volubly assisted him, demanding of her husband why he was such a fool as to endanger his pay. Juma was evidently in some awe of his spouse, and Coja told John privately that she had a terrible tongue.
At length the safari arrived at the site of the farm, and though Mr. Halliday did not flatter himself that his troubles were over, he felt a great relief that the anxieties of the journey were a thing of the past. The first proceeding was to construct a substantial boma. Then he selected a site for his bungalow, fixing on a pleasant knoll above the river and at a distance of about two hundred yards from it. John pleaded for a position nearer the river, but Mr. Halliday pointed out that the stream was at present shrunk, and would no doubt swell to a much greater width in the rainy season, when exhalations from it might be dangerous to health. He had brought a couple of tents to live in while the bungalow was building; his natives ran up grass huts for themselves; and within twenty-four hours of their arrival, with the tents pitched, the huts erected, the sheep and cattle grazing, and a boma enclosing them all, the place had already begun to assume the aspect of a settlement.