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In such times we would shoot game for them, either kongoni or zebra, both of which are considered great delicacies by the black man. However, this is not telling about my memorable elephant experiences in the Guas Ngishu Plateau. We got back to the Nzoia River on December third. On the fifteenth, after many more unsuccessful attempts to get in touch with a herd, Mr.
While reading an account of the trophies secured by Colonel Roosevelt on the Guas Ngishu Plateau, I was mystified by seeing the name of an animal I had never heard tell of a singing topi. For a time I puzzled over this strange creature and finally evolved a satisfactory explanation of how the animal made its appearance in the despatches.
One day we were beating swamps on the Guas Ngishu Plateau. Lions seemed to be numerous in that district. Two days before I had killed two lions near by, and during the morning Stephenson and I had each killed a lioness in the same line of marshy reed beds. We now intended advancing to the next large swamp of the chain and see whether a large, black-maned lion might not be routed out.
Farther up the railway the species is Neumann's hartebeest, while still beyond, on the Guas Ngishu Plateau and the Mau escarpment, the species is called Jackson's hartebeest. In the main the three varieties are almost the same; it is in the horns that the chief distinction lies, with lesser differences in color and stature.
With ox-wagons it is a three days' journey from that water hole to the Guas Nyiro River at the border of the Sotik. The country through which we passed continued to be the same as that of the Mau escarpment a succession of low hills and shallow valleys covered with the small, twisted trees. And there was plenty of water on the way. But there was no game in the district.
They were the Duke of Peñaranda and Sr. de la Huerta, and reported no lions during their few days in the district. Prince Lichtenstein was also somewhere on the plateau, but we didn't run across him. In addition to these three parties and ours, the only other expedition in the Guas Ngishu Plateau was Colonel Roosevelt's party, toward which, by previous agreement, we made our way.
The elephants of this district roam the slopes of the mountains and often make long swinging trips out in the broad stretches of the Guas Ngishu Plateau to the eastward, in all a district probably fifty miles wide by sixty or seventy miles long.
It was as though we were traversing an endless orchard, clean, beautiful, and exhilarating in the cool winds of the African highlands. And then, all suddenly, we came to the end of the trees, and before us, like a great, heaving yellow sea, lay the Guas Ngishu Plateau that stretches northward one hundred miles and always above seven thousand feet in altitude.
On Mount Kenia, the high Guas Ngishu Plateau and Mount Elgon, the thought of sickness was entirely absent. These districts were found to be salubrious and free from ticks and mosquitoes. Snakes Before going to Africa, I must admit that the thought of serpents occasioned much anxiety. I didn't like the idea of tramping around through grass and reeds where poisonous snakes might be found.
It is wakeful sport hunting these four kinds of game and in my experience elephant hunting is the "most wakefullest" of them all. In my several months of African hunting I had four different encounters with elephants. The first two were on Mount Kenia and the last two were on the Guas Ngishu Plateau, near where it merges into the lower slopes of Mount Elgon.
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