There was delay in getting mules.

One of them had shot three hundred elephants in the Belgian Congo during the last four years, and it was suspected he had been poaching.

The other had been caught by the Belgian authorities on his last trip, lost all his ivory and guns by confiscation, but was ready to make another try.

The ivory game is a rich one and there are always venturesome men who are willing to take chances with the law in getting the prizes.
The Boyce party with its two balloons and its great number of box kites and its moving picture equipment and its twenty-nine cameras and its vast equipment was slow in starting, but it expected to get away on September twenty-fourth, the day after we left.

They planned to fill their balloon in Nairobi and tow it at the end of a special train as far as Kijabe, where they were to strike inland from the railway.