process, and not without much suffering and loss of life
are the blank spaces upon the map gradually filled up. Here are two bulky volumes, recording the labours of two separate attempts at exploration, and we cannot help being struck by the pitiful smallness of the results which they seem to have achieved. Starting from neighbouring points upon the coast of British East Africa, these expeditions followed nearly parallel lines, the one passing south of Mount Xenia as far as Lake Baringo, the other north of the same mountain, to what was known as the Lorian Lake, and proved to be the Lorian Swamp. Both of them traversed, for the greater part of their route, ground that was already known, and neither offers as the result of geographical investigation much more than the verification of knowledge already received.
In Mr. Gregory's book, however, The Great Rift Valley, there is much which will interest the naturalist and ethnolo-
gist. The author, who is attached to the Natural History Museum at home, originally undertook his journey, not as an explorer on his own account, but as the scientific member of a large expedition which had been set on foot mainly for the purposes of sport. The original expedition collapsed through mismanagement and the ultimate defection of its chief, and 1Sfr. Gregory, finding himself stranded on the East African .ioast, and anxious not to return without having effected some )f his plans, very pluckily started a small expedition of ski own. The venture was rendered the more difficult
and dangerous by his inexperience in African travel, and it says much for his courage and determination that he
zarried it out to a successful issue. The main object that he had in view was the acquisition of more precise information
as to the geological structure of the Rift Valley,—the great valley which can be traced from the mountains of Lebanon for some four thousand miles almost to the Cape ; and this information, with regard to the least explored portion of that valley, he seems to have obtained in the fullest and most satisfactory degree. In addition, he has been enabled to supply us with a great quantity of notes upon the fauna and flora of East Africa, and a highly interesting description of the different African races with which he came in contact.
Of these latter, the only tribe which offered any serious hostility to the expedition was that of the Kikuyu, a people inhabiting the southern slopes of Mount Xenia and apparently closely allied to the better-known Masai. Like all other Africans—even the most degraded—they have their good points. They proved excitable and irritable in the highest degree, and furiously hostile, on principle, to all strangers; but when once the stranger had received pledges from them, and those pledges were ratified by blood-brother- hood, he could absolutely count on their devotion. Of one of his Kikuyu guides the author writes :—
" He had had a very trying time with us, but never once lost his temper. What with the hostile chiefs on one side, and me on the other, he was rather between the devil and the deep sea, and I am not sure how he would have applied the simile. We each bluffed and abused him in turn ; but he sat through it with a quiet smile on his face, as if be knew all would come right in the end. He smiled just as serenely when we were chatting together in the evening over the camp fire, as when my clumsy fingers were dressing the ulcers on his legs, or when I was holding my revolver to his head during a threatened attack. As a tribe the Kikuyu are probably as treacherous and fickle as they are repre- sented to be ; but Iyntha never forgot he was my blood-brother, • a.) The Great Rift Valley. By T. W. Gregory. London ; John Murray.— (2.) 2 hroujh Jungle and Desert. By W. A. Chanler. London : 1Jaemdlan and Co. or the duties which that relationship entailed. He acted all through with splendid devotion, which amply atoned for the scores of lies he told when under the influence of the counsel of hostile chiefs."
There is something infinitely pathetic in the relations between the European explorer and his native followers as they are described in these pages. The fidelity of the latter is that of the dumb animal,—unreasoning, unquestioning, and without understanding. And by none is this fidelity more strikingly shown than by the much-abused Zanzibari porters, for whom. hardly a single African traveller has ever a good word. Mr.
Gregory, at any rate, tries to do them justice in declaring that the Zanzibari are the real heroes of African exploration :
"They do their work without the stimulus of the incentive of exploration; they have no share in the interest of the scientific problems ; they enjoy none of the credit of success. They only receive their scanty allowance of a pound and a half of grain a day as food when on the march, and a miserable pittance of ten rupees a month as pay on their return. Yet for these they have to endure hardships and privations, compared with which those of their European master, with his comfortable tent and stores of tinned provisions, are for the most part trivial inconveniences. The very highest success in life they can hope for is only promotion to the rank of headman. Only a small minority can ever obtain the greater dignity and higher responsibilities of this position. For the majority, if they escape the natives, who are ever ready to murder a lonely porter for the sake of his load, and never fall ill during a period of double marches and half rations on one of the cold inland plateaux, there remains but the oblivion of an early and unhonoured grave."
The road of the explorer is marked by the graves of many victims. For which reason we cannot but deprecate any exploration that entails unnecessary loss of life. And, more often than not, the European brings death also to the wilder tribes whom he visits. He is not guilty of the devastation spread by the Arab slave-trader, or by those tribes that live by plundering their weaker neighbours ; he does not kill except in self-defence ; but, for all that, he does kill, and the wild justice that he does serves to little good purpose. Happily Mr. Gregory's narrative is marred by no tale of fighting, and, owing to the care that he took of his followers, there was little or no mortality amongst his train,—a fast which does him the more credit when one takes into account his former inexperience of African life and the somewhat trying test to which he put the endurance of his porters. They actually followed him into the snow and ice of Mount Kenia, making the ascent of more than 16,000 ft., a striking proof of the confidence with which he must have inspired them.
Mr. Chanler's Through Jungle and Desert tells a very
different tale. The mortality amongst his men was so great that one is not in the least surprised to learn that his last levy of porters deserted him in a body, bringing his explora- tions to an untimely end. Nor is it necessary to account for their defection, as Mr. Chanler does, by the jealousy and underhand machinations of the British authorities in Zanzibar. The total result of Mr. Chanler's enterprise seems to be comprised in the discovery of a wandering pastoral tribe, the Rendile, rich in camels and other beasts of burden, and of the fact that the Lorian Lake is not a lake bat a swamp. Mr. Chanler had the enormous advantage of being accompanied by the well-known African traveller, Lieutenant Ludwig von Hahne', whose former journeys in the same region have afforded material for a very important book. Unfortu- nately Von Hohnel was so severely wounded in an encounter with a rhinoceros, that his co-operation was lost to the author, who does not seem to have effected much without him. The latter's book contains much exciting adventure, but it is spoilt, to a critical reader, by its obvious want of exact accuracy of statement. We are willing to believe that his caravan defeated, after two hours' fierce fighting, a force of two or three thousand brave and active Wamsaras. But when we are told that the youthful Wamsara under sixteen can hurl from a sling a atone as "big as a Dutch cheese" a distance of one hundred yards, our powers of credulity are sensibly weakened. Nevertheless, the book is by no means uninteresting, and its illustrations are excellent.
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