East Coast fever came across the German border a year and a half ago, and since then, in spite of such preventive measures as our scanty means allow, it has been gradually and slowly spreading through the Protectorate. A diseased cow may take thirty days to die. In the meantime wherever it goes the swarming ticks are infected. They hold their poison for a year. If, during that time, other cattle pass over the ground the ticks fasten upon them and inoculate them with the sickness. And each new victim wanders off to spread the curse to new ticks, who cast it back to new cattle, and so on till the end of the story. At each point fresh areas of ground become distempered, and fresh cows begin to drop off one by one, leaving their evil inheritance to the ravening insects.
Government Farm at Naivasha.
So here we see the two principles of Nature at work simultaneously—the blood-stock rams and bulls spreading their healthy, fruitful life in ever-widening circles through the land; the infected cattle carrying their message of death in all directions. Every point that either attains, becomes at once a new centre of vitality or dissolution. Both processes march deliberately forward to limitless multiplications. The native is helpless in the face of advancing ruin. Left to itself the evil would assuredly devour the good, till the cattle were exterminated and the sickness starved to death for lack of prey. But at this moment the white biped with faculties of ratiocination intervenes from the tin-roofed Department of Agriculture; discovers, for instance, that ground may be purified by putting upon it sheep, into whom the ticks discharge their poison harmlessly and are thereafter purged; erects hundreds of miles of wire fencing to cut the country up into compartments, as a warship is divided by bulkheads; encloses infected areas; destroys suspected animals; searches methodically and ever more hopefully for prophylactics and remedies; with one hand arrests the curse, with the other speeds the blessing, and in so doing is surely discharging rather an important function from a good many points of view.
My friends and I took four days in travelling to the Victoria Nyanza, although the distance can be covered in twenty-four hours; for we turned aside every day for sport or business, while our train waited obligingly in a siding. Of the latter, indeed, there was no lack, for the Governor and the heads of several departments were in the train, and we laboured faithfully together at many prickly things. Then at the stations came farmers, surveyors, and others, with words of welcome or complaint, and a deputation of Boer settlers with many expressions of loyalty to the Crown, and the chiefs of the Lumbwa and Nandi tribes, with a crowd of warriors, and their Laibon with his four wives, all in a row, till I was as tired of making "brief and appropriate" speeches as my companions must have been of hearing them.
The Laibon's Wives.