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Far ahead, like a little knob of blue, was Sergoi Hill, forty miles away, and beyond, in a fainter blue, were the hills that mark the limit of white man's passport. On the map that district is marked: "Natives probably treacherous." Off to the left, a hundred miles away, the dim outline of Mount Elgon rose in easy slopes from the horizon.
For a language that has only a few words like shauri, backsheesh, apana, and chukula the native lingo is a most elastic one. There were two or three things that we had come to Mount Elgon for and about which we desired information. The first was "elephants," and we found, after hours of talk, that there was none in the vicinity.
Elgon, with its elephants, was our goal, and in between were the black-maned lions that we hoped to meet. It would be hard to exaggerate the charm of this climate. And yet this, one thought, was equatorial Africa, which, in the popular imagination, is supposed to be synonymous with torrential rains, malignant fevers, and dense jungles of matted vegetation.
It developed later in the day, however, that a Ketosh is a member of the tribe of that name, and their habitat is on the southern slopes of Elgon. The Ketoshites, or Ketoshians, as the case may be, are a cattle- and sheep-raising tribe.
The mountain is distinctly out of the picture-post-card belt in fact, the only belt that one will find around Elgon is the timber belt that encircles the mountain, and perhaps also a few that the local residents wear on Sundays and national holidays. The function of the latter class of belt is to keep up a gay appearance. It is worn for looks, not warmth.
President Roosevelt was asked if he would coöperate in the work, and he expressed a keen willingness to do so. When our party arrived at Nairobi, in September, a letter awaited Mr. Akeley, renewing Colonel Roosevelt's desire to help in collecting the group. It was in answer to this invitation that Mr. Akeley and our party had gone to the Mount Elgon country to meet Mr.
But in spite of the aggressive bearing of some of them at one time or another, I had the feeling that the elephants would run away from us the instant they definitely determined where we were. And it was while laboring under this impression that I met my second Mount Elgon herd of elephants and learned by bitter experience that the impression was wholly false.
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.
Sometimes we remained in one camp a day or more in order to search the lion retreats more thoroughly, but never a black-maned lion was routed from his lair. A few weeks later, when the dry grass had been burned to make way for new grass, as is done each year, the chances would be greatly improved, and we hoped for better luck when we retraced our steps from Elgon in December.
I have not seen the grysbok, or the suni, or the dibitag, or the lechwi, or the aoul, or the gerenuk, or the blaauwbok, or the chevrotain, or lots of others, but who in the world could guess what they were or what they looked like, judging only from the names? Mount Elgon is one of the four great mountains of Africa.
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