And so goodbye to Flossie.
After leaving the Mission-house we made our way, comparatively
unmolested, past the base of Mount Kenia, which the Masai call
'Donyo Egere', or the 'speckled mountain', on account of the
black patches of rock that appear upon its mighty spire, where
the sides are too precipitous to allow of the snow lying on them;
then on past the lonely lake Baringo, where one of our two remaining
Askari, having unfortunately trodden on a puff-adder, died of
snake-bite, in spite of all our efforts to save him. Thence
we proceeded a distance of about a hundred and fifty miles to
another magnificent snow-clad mountain called Lekakisera, which
has never, to the best of my belief, been visited before by a
European, but which I cannot now stop to describe. There we
rested a fortnight, and then started out into the trackless and
uninhabited forest of a vast district called Elgumi. In this
forest alone there are more elephants than I ever met with or
heard of before. The mighty mammals literally swarm there
entirely unmolested by man, and only kept down by the natural
law that prevents any animals increasing beyond the capacity
of the country they inhabit to support them. Needless to say,
however, we did not shoot many of them, first because we could
not afford to waste ammunition, of which our stock was getting
perilously low, a donkey loaded with it having been swept away
in fording a flooded river; and secondly, because we could not
carry away the ivory, and did not wish to kill for the mere sake
of slaughter.
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