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Updated: June 21, 2025
It was the only door we saw, but Askar said the door he meant was away off somewhere else, and he was so vague and confused in his bearings that we felt his information was unreliable. The crater of Mount Elgon has long since lost any resemblance to a volcanic crater. It is a great valley, or bowl, surrounded by a lofty rim that in reality is a considerable chain of mountains.
Mount Elgon is not an imposing mountain and on most occasions there is no snow on its peaks. Only one time during the several weeks that we were in sight of it was its summit capped with snow. A few species of small animals live in the crater, but no human beings.
Thus ended our Kenia elephant experience, for a letter from Colonel Roosevelt, asking Mr. Akeley if he could come to Nairobi for a conference on their elephant group, led to our departure from the Mount Kenia country. The other two elephant experiences were much more spectacular and perhaps are worthy of a separate story. The Mount Elgon elephants have a very bad reputation.
There are two kinds of waterbuck that the East African hunter will find in the course of his travels, the common waterbuck which we saw in such numbers on the Tana River, and the Defassa, or "sing-sing" waterbuck, which is found in the higher altitudes up toward the Mau escarpment and Mount Elgon.
Owing to intertribal warfare the Elgon district has been closed for some time and it has only been during the last year or so that hunting parties have again been allowed to enter. Since that time a number of parties have been in, the Duke of Alba among the first, and later Doctor Rainsford, Frederick Selous and, Mr. McMillan, Captain Ashton, the Duke of Peñaranda, Mr. Roosevelt, and a few others.
The traveler who goes to Mount Elgon will not be distracted by sounds of civilization, except such as he takes with him. He will travel for days without seeing a sign of human life beyond his own following. The country west of the Nzoia River is uninhabited and is abandoned to the elephant and the giraffe and other animals that care not for the madding crowd.
In our expedition to Mount Elgon we encountered only two places where the mark of civilization showed Eldoma Ravine and Sergoi. In the former place the only white man was the subcommissioner, and in the latter there was one policeman, and a general store kept by a South African.
Very little of the hunting is done in jungles in fact there are few jungles except on the slopes of the mountains and along the course of streams. Our safari went into the Athi Plains, along the Athi River down the Tana River, up on Mount Kenia and later on the Guas Ngishu Plateau, along the Nzoia River, and up Mount Elgon.
So our tins of camp pie and kippered herring and ox tongue remained unopened and we lived as we never had before. When the day's hunt was over the sun in a splendid effort painted such sublime sunsets above Mount Elgon as I had never dreamed of. And the music of hundreds of African birds along the river's edge greeted us with the cool, delightful dawn.
One night we interviewed Askar, one of the Somali gunbearers. He said he had been up the mountain a year or two before with a Frenchman who wanted to see the mysterious natural wonders of Mount Elgon.
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