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Updated: June 5, 2025
We crossed the river on the rocks at the head of these falls, and after some hours' hard marching reached camp without further incident. In the course of my little excursions round Tsavo I gradually discovered that I was nearly always able to make my way to any required point of the compass by following certain well-defined animal paths, which I mapped out bit by bit during my explorations.
At this time the river was in low water, and the falls consequently did not look their best; but in flood time they form a fine sight, and the thunder of the falling water can then be plainly heard at Tsavo, over seven miles away, when the wind is in the right direction.
Away to the north-east stretched the unbroken line of the N'dungu Escarpment, while far off to the south I could just catch a glimpse of the snow-capped top of towering Kilima N'jaro. The one redeeming feature of the neighbourhood was the river from which Tsavo takes its name.
But in 1898, when the Colonel arrived, the railway had not been carried farther than the Tsavo, a tributary of the Sabaki, which enters the sea north of Mombasa. A temporary wooden bridge crossed the Tsavo, and the Colonel was to build a permanent iron bridge over the river, and had besides the supervision of the railway works for thirty miles in each direction.
The tireless Mahina had also collected some dry grass for my bed, and I turned in at once, with my rifle handy, and slept the sleep of the just, regardless of all the wild beasts in Africa. At dawn Mabruki roused me with a cup of steaming hot coffee and some biscuits, and a start was at once made on our return journey to Tsavo.
After leaving Tsavo, the character of the country remains unaltered for some considerable distance, the line continuing to run through the thorny nyika, and it is not until Makindu is reached about two hundred miles from the coast that a change is apparent.
We looked out at Tsavo with devouring interest. All was still, with the dead silence of a tropical night. Then the train steamed on and we had several hours in a berth to think the matter over. In the early hours of morning, we stopped at Simba, the "Place of Lions," where the station-master has many lion scares even now.
He was still alive when I saw him next morning, but so terribly mauled that he died before he could be got to the hospital. Within a few days of this the two brutes made a most ferocious attack on the largest camp in the section, which for safety's sake was situated within a stone's throw of Tsavo Station and close to a Permanent Way Inspector's iron hut.
When the patients had been moved, I had a covered goods-wagon placed in a favourable position on a siding which ran close to the site which had just been abandoned, and in this Brock and I arranged to sit up that night. Four miles from Tsavo they had attempted to seize a coolie who was walking along the line.
Unfortunately the train by which I travelled up from Mombasa reached Tsavo at midnight, but all the same I got out and prowled about as long as time would permit, half wondering every moment if the ghosts of the two man-eaters would spring at me out of the bushes.
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