Once in our camp we made a hammock for him out of a blanket tied to a pole, and made him over to two porters with the promise that they would get no supper if they lost him.

Then we started--uphill, toward the red Kikuyu heights, where settlers were already trying to grow potatoes for which there was no market, and onions that would only run to seed.
To our left rear and right front were the highest mountain ranges in Africa.

Before us was the pass through which the railway threaded over the wide high table-land before dipping downward to Victoria Nyanza.
On our left front was all Kikuyu country, and after that Lumbwa, and native reserves, and forest, and swamp, and desert, and the German boundary.
We made a long march of it that first day, and camped after dark within two miles of Kikuyu station.

Most of the scrub thereabouts was castor oil plant, that makes very poor fuel; yet there were lions in plenty that roared and scouted around us even before the tents were pitched.
Nobody got much sleep that night, although the porters were perfectly indifferent to the risk of snoozing on the watch.

Kazimoto produced a thing called a kiboko--a whip of hippopotamus-hide a yard and a half long, and with the aid of that and Will's good humor we constituted a yelling brigade, whose business was to make the welkin ring with godless noises whenever a lion came close enough to be dangerous.
I made up a signal party of all our personal boys with our lanterns, swinging them in frantic patterns in the darkness in a way to terrify the very night itself.