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Updated: May 29, 2025
The shriek of our engine echoed and re-echoed weirdly from the serried trunks of trees and from the great cliffs that seemed to lift themselves as we descended. We debarked at Kijabe well after dark.
Muhorini, also on the railroad, is a favorite place for those who want the roan antelope; Naivasha is a good place for hippo, and south of Kijabe, in what is called the Sotik, is a district where nearly all sorts of game abound.
Ray Ulyate, the white hunter to the expedition, had already gone to Kijabe to prepare his ox-wagons against our coming, and the Boma Trading Company had engaged a special train to leave Nairobi on the fifth. On the morning of that day we held the customary procession of an outgoing safari down the main street of Nairobi to the waiting train.
As a matter of fact, we thought so ourselves, but Greater Kudu was as good an excuse as another. The most immediate of our physical difficulties was the Thirst. Six miles from Kijabe we would leave the Kedong River. After that was no more water for two days and nights.
The most imposing structure in the place is the railroad station, with its red wooden building propped up on piles, its tin guest-house alongside, and the neat gravel platform growing a clump of trees. The rest of Kijabe is composed of four other houses, the goods-shed, an open-faced Indian booth, the post-office, and the water-tank.
Above the loads on the porters' heads two flags flashed their colors in the sunlight the stars and stripes, and the house flag of the company, with the white buffalo skull against the red background, and underneath the motto, Sapiens qui Vigilat. The night had already fallen black and cold when the special train crested the top of the divide and coasted down grade into Kijabe.
The railroad at Kijabe runs along the face of the hills, so that the land drops down abruptly to the plains below, and you can look away for miles over the Kedong and Rift valleys, with the two sentinel extinct volcanoes rising black against the heat-blurred sky; The floors of the valleys are laid with volcanic ash.
It was nearly noon of the following day before the scouting party rejoined the expedition on the platform of the Kijabe station. The party reported that near the base of Longernot, the northern volcano, a belt of lava rock rises perpendicularly from the plain. Close to the southern end of this belt they had flushed two lions, a male and a female, and had kept sight of them for fully an hour.
During the seven days since we had left Kijabe, the expedition had roped and photographed a cheetah, a serval-cat, a hartebeest, an eland, and a wart-hog. Although we had been given no opportunity yet to find out how we were going to hold a rhino or what we would do when the lion charged, still, in addition to our success with the lesser animals, we had acquired something else of value.
"They'll need at least four or five days before we can put them at a lion well, we've got to chance it." The next five days were the longest in the history of the expedition. The Colonel, Means, and Ulyate remained at Kijabe with the outfit.
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