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Updated: June 22, 2025
About a month later, however, we encountered McMillan himself in Nairobi. I was just out from a very hard trip to the coast-Billy not with me-and wanted nothing so much as a few days' rest. McMillan's cordiality was not to be denied, however, so the very next day found us tucking ourselves into a buckboard behind four white Abyssinian mules.
Although the lion which caused poor Bhoota's death was the last I managed to shoot in East Africa, I saw several others afterwards while travelling up and down the line at different times on construction work. In particular, I remember one very curious incident which happened early on the morning of June 2, when I was travelling towards Nairobi, accompanied by Dr. McCulloch.
At Nairobi he had received news of the World War that had already started, and, anticipating an immediate invasion of British East Africa by the Germans, was hurrying homeward to fetch his wife to a place of greater security. With him were a score of his ebon warriors, but far too slow for the ape-man was the progress of these trained and hardened woodsmen.
Again and again rhinoceros drew back to repeat his butting of that tree. By the time Cuninghame reached the spot, the tree, with its despairing burden of black birds, was clinging to the soil by its last remaining roots. In the Nairobi Club I met a gentleman with one arm gone at the shoulder.
Suddenly it happens on a barbed wire fence, and immediately after enters the town of Nairobi. The game has persisted right up to that barbed wire fence. The station platform is thronged with a heterogeneous multitude of people. The hands of a dozen raggetty black boys are stretched out for luggage.
They do all the preliminary work and relieve you of most of the worry. If you wish them to do so, they will get your complete outfit, so you need not bring anything with you but a suitcase. They will have the whole outfit ready for you by the time you arrive in Nairobi.
Its total area appears to be about 13,000 square miles. In addition to the two great preserves described above the government of British East Africa has established on the Uasin Gishu Plateau a centrally located sanctuary for elands, roan antelopes and hippopotamii. There is also a small special rhinoceros preserve about fifty miles southeastward of Nairobi, around Kiu station, on the railway.
Three days after this incident railhead reached Nairobi, and I was given charge of the new division of the line. Nairobi was to be the headquarters of the Railway Administration, so there was an immense amount of work to be done in converting an absolutely bare plain, three hundred and twenty-seven miles from the nearest place where even a nail could be purchased, into a busy railway centre.
On this steamer there were several interesting people. First in station and importance was Sir Percy Girouard, the newly appointed governor of British East Africa, who was going out to Nairobi to take his position. Sir Percy is a splendid type of man, only about forty-two years old, but with a career that has been filled with brilliant achievements. He was born in Canada and was knighted in 1900.
Mount Kenia, eighty or ninety miles north, was clear and bright with its snow-capped peaks sparkling in the early sunlight. Off to its left rose the Aberdare Range, with the dominating peak of Kinangop; to its right rose the lone bald uplift of Donyo Sabuk, and to the east were the blue Lukenia Hills. The house-tops of Nairobi waved miragically in the valley, with a low range of blue hills beyond.
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