But the times have changed, and so it comes to pass that my people too join in the dance, which lasts late into the night: that songs of the warriors and the women--“‘Singolioitin loo-‘l-muran” and “Loo-‘ngoroyok”--ring out through the darkness, the chorus finding a manifold echo with its oft-repeated “Ho! He! Ho! Na! He! Hoo!” It is a “Leather Stocking” kind of poetry, and indeed the redskins of the New World and the Masai here in Dark Africa seem to me alike. The former had to yield to civilisation, the same fate awaits the latter.
No one had the least anxiety about the night. We quietly allowed the Moran[2] to bivouac near the camp. Our march through the wild highlands of the Wasotiko and the Wanandi had deadened our sense of such dangers. We could have no forebodings of the fierce struggle lasting for years that was yet to come between the English troops and those peoples, or imagine how warlike and skilled in self-defence they were. The presence of hundreds of spear- and club-armed warriors in the camp had become an almost daily experience, and great was the surprise of the English officers, later on, when they heard that the great caravan, which I had joined, had had the good fortune to pass through these districts without any fighting.
For me my serious illness had all at once interrupted the austere and wild delights of this life of the march and the caravan. But I had now become doubly responsive to the joys of travel amid light and air, freedom and endless space; doubly responsive also to the changing impressions derived from my week of marching through lonely primeval forests, bamboo thickets, and grassy plains--scenes in which, as my friend Richard Kandt, the discoverer of the source of the Nile, so strikingly remarks,[3] every plant, every stone, seems to cry out again to one in the vast solitude but one word: “The desert! the desert!”
YOUNG MASAI DANCING AND SINGING NEAR MY CAMP.]
In the early morning hours of January 15 there was a light continuous rainfall. A short march of only two hours brought us to our camping place on the shore of Lake Nakuro.
Far away extended the panorama of the lake, which lay before us filling its hollow bed, with its banks at this season of the year yielding fresh pastures to numberless herds of wild animals, and its waters affording rest and food to countless members of the feathered tribe. I had hardly ever seen greater numbers of the pretty little dwarf gazelles (_Gazella thomsoni_, Gthr.). Thousands and thousands more of these graceful creatures showed themselves on the fresh, green, grassy meadows of the lake margin, or scattered over its pebble beds of obsidian, augite, and pumice-stone. Wherever one turned one’s gaze it fell again and again upon these beautiful gazelles, which in many ways reminded one of wild goats at pasture, and were so strangely trustful that they often allowed the spectator to come quite close to them. Marked as are the colours of its hairy covering, the dwarf gazelle does not stand out boldly from the background, whether this be a plain blackened by bush-fires, or the mere bare ground, dun-coloured and brown, or land covered with soft green grass. But how clearly defined are its brown, black, and white, when we look closely at the hide of a specimen we have secured, or see it in a museum.