Through Central Africa Author:James Barnes Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Through Central Africa FROM EAST TO WEST CHAPTER I ON THE TRAIL FROM NAIROBI SOME old Latin once recorded that "All things new come from Africa," but... more » there are certainly some things that have come from there (indirectly perhaps) that are not new, and these are books. It seems to me that everyone who has ever gone there, no matter his excuse, incentive, or provocation, has perpetrated at least one volume, and some have had the temerity to repeat the dreadful experiment. Almost all the books that I have read contain photographs and descriptions of Nairobi, that busy little centre of about eleven hundred whites, and four times that quantity of blacks, and where the Indian Fundi and bazaar merchant have the monopoly of the contractor's calling and trade. Suffice it, therefore, that, having reached this usual starting-point in the usual way by train from Mombasa, all of our thoughts were concentrated upon getting off on Safari and away from the haunts of men. Nairobi irked us. Safari = Caravan: route of march, n It was, luckily, the off season, and the visiting "big game hunters"—mostly armed tourists out to kill—were not much in evidence. There was a land boom on; everyone was anxious to sell a farm or buy one—the latter class being the great minority. Perhaps it was for this reason that porters were easy to obtain. We were fortunate also to secure, for our first trip, the services ot Mr. S. H. Lydford, a young white hunter who possessed both knowledge and interest in photographic work, and who knew well the country into which it was our intention to penetrate—the little- known and waterless tracts north of the Uashu Neru up toward the Abyssinian border. It was an old story to Kearton. It was his third visit to British East Africa. He had been through it all b...« less