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Updated: June 22, 2025
"There's that confounded Superman again," we mutter, if we happen to be busy. "I wonder what stunt he's going to do now!" A consideration of the above beautiful fable may go a little way toward explaining the supposed native stolidity in the face of the white man's wonders. A few years ago some misguided person brought a balloon to Nairobi.
Nairobi is not a beautiful place, but it is new and busy, and the people who live there are working wonders in changing a bad location into what some day will be a pretty place. It is over five thousand feet high, healthy, and cold at night.
There is no denying the fact that there is considerable drinking in Nairobi. There was as much before we got there as there was after we got there, however. After the arrival of the European steamer at Mombasa business is brisk for several days as the different parties sally forth for the wilds. On our ship there were four different parties.
But on the occasion of one three months' journey into comparatively unknown country we ran up against difficulties. Some two weeks before our contemplated start two or three cases of bubonic plague had been discovered in the bazaar, and as a consequence Nairobi was quarantined.
We thought of the glory of driving through the streets of Nairobi with a lion or two hanging over the back of the carriage. It would have been historic. Citizens would have talked of it for years. It would have taken an honored place in the lion-hunting literature of Africa, for no lion hunters have ever pursued a band of lions in a carriage and brought back a carriage-load of them.
Lions may be heard roaring within a mile or so of town; and leopards occasionally at night come on the verandas of the outlying dwellings. Naked savages from the jungle untouched by civilization in even the minutest particular wander the streets unabashed. It is this constantly recurring, sharply drawn contrast that gives Nairobi its piquant charm.
The British colonial office knew where it was and a fair number of English sportsmen had visited it in the last six or eight years. Perhaps twenty-five or thirty Americans had been in Nairobi on their way to the rich game fields that lie in all directions from the town, but beyond these few outsiders the place was unknown.
Gazelles did the same, and away off in the distance a few wildebeests went galloping slowly to a safe distance. They were probably safe at any distance had they only known it, for up to the hour when I cantered forth from Nairobi in quest of lions and rhinos I had not shot at anything for three years, nor hit anything for ten.
Those who care less for dress or have less to get it with can rub along very cheaply. The women to be seen in the streets of Nairobi are mostly of the Kikuyu tribe. They are pretty much of a pattern. Their heads are shaven, either completely or to leave only ornamental tufts; and are generally bound with a fine wire fillet so tightly that the strands seem to sink into the flesh.
We saw them fairly clear of everything, then turned them over to Kongoni, while we returned to Nairobi to see after our effects. This has to do with a lion hunt on the Kapiti Plains. On the veranda at Nairobi I had some time previous met Clifford Hill, who had invited me to visit him at the ostrich farm he and his cousin were running in the mountains near Machakos.
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