Thinking black; 22 years without a break in the long grass of Central ...

BORING OUT EAST 353
three-feet-high youngster whose brow is creased in a
worried little frown. " I bet three beads," retorts his
opponent, and forthwith they link their two little fingers
of the right hand solemnly to conclude the Ghipikwa, or
wager. And all this with the customary placidity of the
Epsom racecourse— yes, here at the world's end. To the
tramp Missionary it is difficult to say whether one is more
harassed or exhilarated in being so startlingly reminded of
the solidarity of the race. Is it not the tempter s endless
taunt that this negro of ours is too unlike the European
even faintly to understand our point ? Yet little do these
toy gamblers guess that they are tying themselves up in
the same bundle with all the absconding clerks, bank-
tellers, cashiers, treasurers, trustees, and speculators who
ever put their money on the wrong horse. Keflection :
So the old round world is kin after all.
Gunpowder has never reached these simple folks, and
the hunting is all done on tiptoe with silent poisoned
arrows. They plead that one bang from a gun would be
too tell-tale, booming along the valley. These canons of
theirs are whispering galleries, that, with a great awaken-
ing clang, echo and re-echo the secret of even the hunter s
footfall. As free as a bird, there never was such a thing
as game laws, the forest being called Butala wa Leza, or
God's larder. The innovation of English game laws would
be high treason, for do they not say, " The antelopes were
made for man, not man for the antelopes " ? Sure am I a
black local parliament would, with the whole force of its
judgment and rhetoric, annul all laws against hunting. Err