The Kilima-Njaro Expedition by Harry Johnston

Having once more reassembled the men, rearranged the burdens, and left behind what we could not carry in the kind charge of a missionary who was temporarily residing on the summit of Ndara Hill, we started on a day's journey to Mwatate, passing through dense thorny bush, rocky defiles, and dried-up stream courses, and finally reaching, to my joy, the first channel of running water we had met with since leaving the vicinity of the coast. The ground along its banks had been cleared and cultivated; we crossed the stream on a rickety wooden bridge, and passed up through fields of maize and brakes of sugar-cane to our camping-place, under an umbrageous tree. Here pleasant-mannered natives greeted us; we paid the small present demanded as an indemnity for passing through their country and drinking "their" water, and then enjoyed a welcome rest amid surroundings of quiet beauty. The next day we were travelling through a Swiss-like country of mountain passes and richly fertile valleys, and at length came to Bura, a camping-place at the foot of the strangely peaked mountains of that name. Here we were nearly having a skirmish with the natives, who demanded an exorbitant payment for the right of drinking from their river. However, a resolute attitude on our part preserved the peace, and we were soon on excellent terms with the Wa-taita, buying fowls, maize, and honey at a great rate. On the morrow we skirted the little river of Bura for a few miles, and then, reluctantly leaving its belt of rich, majestic forest, plunged resolutely into the waterless wilderness which separated us from the base of Kilima-njaro.

Although the journey before us was a far longer one than that terrible march to Maungu, it was, nevertheless, marked by no sufferings from fatigue and thirst, for I had the men now well in hand, and was careful to ascertain that no one had started without a due supply of water. The country we passed through was indeed a wilderness, but yet rather parklike in its aspect. There was an entire absence of undergrowth, and tallish trees with cedar-like crowns rose at regular intervals, looking, in their uniformity of unvarying red trunks and bright green compact foliage, like an unskilfully painted landscape. Other noticeable features in the scene were the tall red ant-hills and, strange imitation, the tall red antelopes, a species of hartebeest,[8] resembling faintly in shape the form of a giraffe with sloping hind-quarters, high shoulders, and long neck. Being a deep red-brown in colour, and standing one by one stock-still at the approach of the caravan, it was really most difficult and puzzling sometimes to know which was hartebeest and which was ant-hill; for the long grass hiding the antelope's legs left merely a red-humped mass, which, until it moved, might well be the mound of red earth constructed by the white termites. The unconscious mimicry was rendered the more ludicrously exact sometimes by the sharply-pointed, flag-like leaves of a kind of squill-a liliaceous plant-which frequently crowned the summit of the ant-hill, or grew at its base, thus suggesting the horns of an antelope, rather with the head erect, or browsing low down. The assimilation cannot have been fancied on my part, for it deceived even the sharp eyes of my men; and again and again a hartebeest would start into motion at twenty yards distance and gallop off, while I was patiently stalking an ant-hill, and crawling on my stomach through thorns and aloes, only to find the supposed antelope an irregular mass of red clay.