have clothed the greater part of the Kikuyu country at no distant date. The hedges between the fields were mostly of wild tomato, and bore both fruit and flowers. Beans, sweet potatoes, yams, and gourds were abundant. Narrow paths of greasy red soil traversed the country in all directions, crossing the streams by bridges formed of felled trees, the trunks of which are cleft down the centre, the flat surface being upturned. The paths were usually fenced in, and wild flowers grew along their edges. We saw evidence of the use of manure.

Towards the end of this march we entered a hill country, but the cultivation became if anything more extensive and more continuous, and

the crops more luxuriant, for we had now come to that part of Kikuyu in which it appears to rain almost daily. From August 7 to the 15th, it rained every day from midnight, or earlier, until noon or later. We travelled under the most depressing conditions, drenched to the skin from the moment that we rose, making short marches over slippery paths, and pitching our camp on wet ground. Yet the aspect of the country was something never to be forgotten. Here, in the heart of Africa, in a region previously approached by half a dozen white men at most, we traversed square miles of standing maize, neatly divided by slight furrows into rectangular half-acre plots, each, we were told, valued for sale at the price of a goat, and we had to pitch camp in a market-place strewn with corn-cobs, or to march for several miles to the next vacant

space. As we approached the end of Meranga, however, a singular change took place in the aspect of the people. At Magonie's, on the Sagana, they had worn cloth, and, friendship once established, had come freely into our camp, maintaining a day-long market outside it. Here, as we approached the borders of Wangombe and of the dreaded Watumutumu, even the chiefs wore skins, and for hours we marched over a land heavy with crops, and yet saw neither man nor woman. Again and again Kerrerri asked me to prevent our Swahilis from shouting and singing, in order that the inhabitants might not be frightened, and that he might have an opportunity of establishing relations with them.

Through Meranga we followed the valley of the Ragati, an important tributary of the Sagana not marked on the maps, which descends due southwards from Kenya. On August 12 and 13 we crossed its upper basin, where a number of streams from the Kenya forests converge to form the Ragati proper. Here the higher grounds rise above the cultivation and have the aspect of a rough English common, of the kind that would here be overgrown with gorse and bracken. Both the uplands and the stream-edges were brilliant with flowers; indeed, the whole of the upper part of Meranga is a paradise of wild-flowers.

On August 13 we crossed the Ragati and entered the little country of Kaleti, ruled by the chief Wangombe, a terror to the whole neighbourhood. We were told that at the time of our visit he held prisoner the son of our Masai, Ndani, and the brother of our Meranga, Kerrerri. In the early morning of the 14th, before we had as yet met the chief, Magonie and Kerrerri fled from us rather than encounter him. We had no alternative but to advance into his country without a guide. We made straight for his village, with the effect that he came out to meet us. After a long and irritating interview, he at last abandoned his effort to induce us to camp alongside of him, and undertook to guide us to the Sagana and to supply us with food, but he would have nothing to do with our friends the Wameranga.

We now marched for two days through a forest containing many elephants, whose paths we followed. The flowers were here rarer, but of the same species as in the cultivated country. The most singular point, however, was the almost complete absence of winged insects, at any rate in the day-time. Song birds, on the other hand, were abundant. The lofty trees were hung with beard-moss. Here and there we traversed green glades, from which conical hills, clothed with forest, could be seen to rise from among the trees in our neighbourhood. Niana and Kehari, the most prominent of these hills, became important landmarks at a later stage of our journey.

The rain now ceased, though it obviously persisted in the country that we had traversed. Ahead, to northward, was a great arch of blue sky, a clearing which had been seen at times, low on the horizon, from so distant a point as Magonie's. The relation of rain, wind, and

land-relief was, in fact, strikingly illustrated by our experiences. The south-east monsoon was blowing strongly without depositing rain on the plains of the Athi and Sagana, whose elevation is about 5000 feet. When it struck the slope of Kikuyu, which rises gradually from 5000 feet to about 7000 feet, it drenched the whole country side. The high plains of Laikipia, which surmount the slope at an elevation of about 7000 feet, were dry. So sudden is the change from Kikuyu to Laikipia, that in the course of a single march of about 9 miles we left a

dripping forest and came to a land which was the scene during the next few weeks, not merely of prairie fires, but also of forest fires. Yet in the presence of these fires we could see the heavy bank of clouds close at hand, driving up over the brink of the plateau and melting into thin air.

It was on the afternoon of August 15 that we emerged from the forest of Kikuyu, and crossing the Sagana again, here flowing to southwestward as a brawling mountain stream, we pitched the camp which

was to be the base of our operations on Kenya. The site was a high one, and gave a wide view over the brown steppe of Laikipia to the distant curves of the Aberdare range. That evening the setting sun lit up the peak and snows of Kenya, which rose abruptly above the forest curtain of the mountain, at whose edge, splayed out for some distance on to the plain, we had now arrived.

Our first attention was to commissariat. Wangombe had promised us food for our porters, and he now refused to deliver it. We had no alternative but to detain him until he made his word good. We had a store of grain, accumulated during our passage through Meranga, but that was essential for the porters who were to be sent on to the mountain. In two days, as a consequence of our action, a caravan arrived, both of men and women, bringing a considerable supply, for which we paid liberally in cloth. We then paid off a portion of our Wakikuyu and sent them home. At the same time Wagombe left us, promising further

supplies.

Next day, August 18, two parties left the camp-the one, under Sulimani, our Swahili headman, returned to Wangombe's to buy more food; the other was the mountain party in my own charge. Hausburg stayed in camp until the return of Sulimani, and was then to join me. Of the porters going to the mountain, twelve were equipped to remain. there for some time, old Metropolitan police coats, boots, and extra blankets being served out to them.

On the evening of the 18th my party made a short march to a point at the forest edge, close to that by which Gregory entered it. Next day we commenced what we expected to be a tedious passage of perhaps three days. César and Joseph, woodmen as well as icemen, led the way with axes, and two askaris followed with machetes. Thus we cut what the guides christened "la grande route du Mont Kenya." Our work was eased by availing ourselves of elephant-paths and by keeping steadily to the ridge, thus avoiding the tangle by the streams. There was hoar-frost on the ground as we passed through the portal of the first trees in the early morning. Within, tall straight branchless conifers supported a dark roof of foliage with frequent gaps to the sky. The undergrowth was at first of laurel-like shrub and of tall stingingnettles, and here green parrots flew screeching in flocks just above the treetops. Presently tufts of bamboo appeared, and then bamboo ousted all growth but the conifers, the ground-weeds, and the rope and string-like creepers. Hour after hour we forged onward, and after a time upward also, until with unexpected progress we grew ambitious of making the passage of the forest-zone in a single day. And this we accomplished, with one hour to spare before the inexorable tropical nightfall. We camped in a glade, part of the glade-maze which runs along the upper edge of the forest, and above us, comparatively close, was the green treeless shoulder of the mountain, hiding the central peak.

The next day we reconnoitred upward with a view to finding a site for the standing camp, which was to be the halfway shelter between the base of the mountain and the foot of the central peak, and in the afternoon we moved the tents to the spot selected. It was at an elevation of about 10,300 feet, and commanded a view over the forest slopes, across the Laikipian steppes, to Sattima and Nandarua, the twin heights of the Aberdare range. The phenomena of wind and cloud were of unceasing interest as watched from this position. At the camp itself even the lightest wind was rare, yet the drift of the smoke from the fires below showed the constant strength of the monsoon on the

plain which we had left. A vast stratum of cloud hung day and night over the rainy slope by which we had ascended to the plain, and this we came to call the "cloud roof of Kikuyu." On one occasion I looked over its upper surface, across 80 miles of white woolly cloud, to the peaks of Donyo Lamuyu emerging like an island from a sea. Especially in the early morning, a tongue of cloud extended from the Kikuyu roof along the eastern foot of Sattima, thus masking from us the western half of Laikipia. At sunrise the summits of Nandarua and Sattima stood out cold and hard against the western sky, but as the morning advanced clouds capped the heights-clouds, however, of quite independent origin from the Kikuyu roof below, or its Laikipian tongue.

On August 21, César, Joseph, and I went up to what proved to be Gregory's Höhnel valley, and here for the first time we saw the