d the
elephant that he stopped short in his career and made off into the
jungle. As for Waters, he was luckily none the worse for his fall, as
the pit was neither staked at the bottom nor very deep; he soon
scrambled out, and, following up the wounded elephant, succeeded in
finishing him off without further trouble.

Towards the end of 1899 I left for England. A few days before I started
all my Wa Kikuyu "children", as they called themselves, came in a body
and begged to be taken with me. I pictured to them the cold, wet
climate of England and its great distance from their native land; but
they assured me that these were nothing to them, as they only wished to
continue my "children" and to go wherever I went. I could hardly
imagine myself arriving in London with a body-guard of four hundred
more or less naked savages, but it was only with difficulty that I
persuaded them that they had better remain in their own country. The
ever-faithful Mahina, my "boy" Roshan Khan, my honest chaukidar,
Meeanh, and a few other coolies who had been a long time with me,
accompanied me to the coast, where they bade me a sorrowful farewell
and left for India the day before I sailed on my homeward journey.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE FINDING OF THE NEW ELAND

During the early part of last year (1906) I revisited the scene of my
former labours and adventures on a shooting trip. 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. I wanted very much to spend a day
or two in the old place, but my companions were anxious to push on as
quickly as possible to better hunting-grounds. I took the trouble,
however, to wake them out of their peaceful slumbers in order to point
out to them, by the pale moonlight, the strength and beauty of the
Tsavo bridge; but I fear this delicate little attention was scarcely
appreciated as it deserved. Naturally I could not expect them, or
anyone else, to view the bridge quite from my point of view; I looked
on it as a child of mine, brought up through stress and danger and
troubles of all kinds, but the ordinary traveller of course knows
nothing of this and doubtless thinks it only a very commonplace and
insignificant structure indeed.

We spent a few days at Nairobi, now a flourishing town of some 6,