When going down to Naivasha I had on various occasions noticed that the natives when they crossed certain streams used to leave a little food at a particular place, generally a few sweet potatoes broken up—sometimes it was left in the bush; and when I asked why they had done that, they gave me to understand that they were performing some religious rite, but I never managed to get any satisfactory explanation of it.
Still more curious, to my mind, were some huge heaps of stones to be seen at certain places as we passed along the caravan track. When we came within sight of one of these heaps a native would pick up a stone, or he had, perhaps, been carrying one for some time in anticipation of coming to the spot, and cast it on the heap, at the same time muttering some prayer to Ngai, as it was on these occasions that he would ask Ngai for anything that he was in need of. It struck me as very remarkable that in my later travels in Abyssinia I should come across the same kind of heaps of stones, while some of my Abyssinian followers went through a similar performance of adding to the heap. When I questioned an Abyssinian as to the meaning of the performance, he would reply by pointing in the direction of a church, which stood on the top of a hill away in the distance, and tell me that, not being able to go to the church to make his devotions, he threw a stone on the heap as a substitute for the performance of his religious duty; and I noticed that while putting the stone on the heap he would bow towards the church. The Abyssinians are, of course, members of a branch of the Coptic Church, and it struck me as possible that the idea had in some way travelled from them to the Kikuyu, who copied it, not knowing precisely what it meant, but understanding that it was some form of worship of Ngai.
I have already mentioned that the practice of spitting plays a large part in many of the Kikuyu customs, and I also found that the same thing prevailed among the people in the district up towards Lake Rudolph, and in fact it was the custom with the majority of the people up towards the north, as I found when I came in contact with them in my later travels. It might seem to Europeans a vulgar thing to enlarge upon, but it was by no means regarded in the same light by the inhabitants of East Africa, amongst whom it was regarded as the highest compliment you could pay a man if you spat on him, or, better still, on his children. On my first introduction to the big savage chief Wagombi, he asked me to spit on his children; and among both the Masai and Kikuyu a friendly introduction was not complete unless spitting had entered into it. They very seldom speak of their children without spitting, and I concluded that the practice denoted respect.