If you have ever tried to light a cigarette in a terrible hurry and on a windy deck, you will appreciate the elements of uncertainty in the game.
These deck sports served to amuse and divert during the six days on the Indian Ocean, and then the ship's chart said that we were almost at Mombasa.

The theoretical stage of the lion hunt was nearly over and it was now a matter of only a few days until we should be up against the "real thing." I sometimes wondered how I should act with a hostile lion in front of me--whether I would become panic-stricken or whether my nerve would hold true.

There is lots of food for reverie when one is going against big game for the first time.
[Drawing: _Chalking the Pig's Eye_] We landed at Mombasa September sixteenth, seventeen days out from Naples.
Mombasa is a little island about two by three miles in extent.

It is riotous with brilliant vegetation, and, as seen after a long sea voyage through the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, it looks heavenly except for the heat.

Hundreds of great baobab trees with huge, bottle-like trunks and hundreds of broad spreading mango trees give an effect of tropical luxuriance that is hardly to be excelled in beauty anywhere in the East.
Large ships that stop at the island usually wind their course through a narrow channel and land their passengers and freight at the dock at Kilindini, a mile and a half from the old Portuguese town of Mombasa, where all the life of the island is centered.