We disembarked, or "detrained," as they say down there, at a little station on the railroad called Londiani, eight miles south of the equator and about eighty miles from Victoria Nyanza. Then with two transport wagons drawn by thirty oxen, our horses for "galloping" lions, and one hundred porters, we marched north, always at an altitude of from seventy-five hundred to ninety-two hundred feet, through vast forests that stretched for miles on all sides. The country was beautiful beyond words—clean, wholesome, and vast. In many places the scenery was as trim, and apparently as finished as sections of the wooded hills and meadows of Surrey. One might easily imagine oneself in a great private estate where landscape gardeners had worked for years.
One of the Transport Wagons
At night the cold was keen and four blankets were necessary the night we camped two miles from the equator. In the day the sun was hot in the midday hours, but never unpleasantly so. After two days of marching through forests and across great grassy folds in the earth we reached Eldoma Ravine, a subcommissioner's boma that looks for all the world like a mountain health resort. From the hill upon which the station is situated one may look across the Great Rift Valley, two thousand feet below, and stretching away for miles across, like a Grand Cañon of Arizona without any mountains in it. Strong stone walls protect the white residence, for this is a section of the country that has suffered much from native uprisings during the last few years. We called on the solitary white resident one evening, and, true to the creed of the Briton, he had dressed for dinner. The sight of a man in a dinner-coat miles from a white man and leagues from a white woman was something to remember and marvel at.
Northward from Eldoma Ravine for days we marched, sometimes in dense forests so thick that a man could scarcely force himself through the undergrowth that flanked the trail, and sometimes through upland meadows so deep in tall yellow grass as to suggest a field of waving grain, then through miles of country studded with the gnarled thorn tree that looks so much like our apple trees at home. It was as though we were traversing an endless orchard, clean, beautiful, and exhilarating in the cool winds of the African highlands. And then, all suddenly, we came to the end of the trees, and before us, like a great, heaving yellow sea, lay the Guas Ngishu Plateau that stretches northward one hundred miles and always above seven thousand feet in altitude.
Far ahead, like a little knob of blue, was Sergoi Hill, forty miles away, and beyond, in a fainter blue, were the hills that mark the limit of white man's passport. On the map that district is marked: "Natives probably treacherous." Off to the left, a hundred miles away, the dim outline of Mount Elgon rose in easy slopes from the horizon. Elgon, with its elephants, was our goal, and in between were the black-maned lions that we hoped to meet.
It would be hard to exaggerate the charm of this climate. And yet this, one thought, was equatorial Africa, which, in the popular imagination, is supposed to be synonymous with torrential rains, malignant fevers, and dense jungles of matted vegetation. It was more like the friendly stretches of Colorado scenery at the time of year when the grasses of the valley are dotted with flowers of many colors and the sun shines down upon you with genial warmth.
A Night on the Equator
Each morning we marched ten or twelve miles and then went into camp near some little stream. In the afternoon we hunted for lions, beating out swamps, scouting every bit of cover and combing the tall grass for hours at a time. Hartebeest, topi, zebra, eland, oribi, reedbuck, and small grass antelope were upon all sides and at all times.