A SHEEPMAN'S DIARY
May 28th. The long looked for notice about my passage home came this morning, and I have been allotted a berth on the S.S. Rufus Castle, sailing on the third of June. I leave Gilgil for Mombasa at four o'clock to-morrow morning.
At last, then, these years are over, I shall escape, and shall be able to live again in the gracious cities and villages of Christendom. This is a most soulless and terrible country: the blazing sun—the fatal Gorgon's head of Africa—turns all hearts to stone. An incident, significant enough, occurred yesterday. Coming down through the forest I caught sight of an aged native hiding a sheepskin in some undergrowth: I at once took it for granted that he was implicated in the theft of the five sheep taken from the yards a week ago, and in a blind fury at being overreached so many times I rode him down cutting at him with my whip; when he was on the ground, I got off my pony, and kicked him, just as I would any dog, any dog without teeth—
At luncheon time my houseboy told me that this particular old man, Kekwa by name, had bought a skin yesterday from those put aside by me for selling to natives.
May 29th. It was dark as I rode up to the station this morning. At the top of the hill I let the pony wait a moment and by the light of the waning moon looked back at the dark, sinister, and well known outlines of the Rift Valley. How it all came back to me!—the October lambings—the shearing time—the perennial dipping—the places where I had buried natives, where I had trapped lions.
I could see the Eburu mountains away to the left, and I remembered the many days I had spent riding out to the far away camp at Nagum; remembered them almost with nostalgia, now that I knew they were over: days in the dry weather, when all was dust and drought, and the sheep stood panting in any shade they could find, and attempted to graze only towards the evening: days in the wet
