The present story completes a series of three books in which I have
endeavoured to give impressions of life in the immense region known as
Equatorial Africa. The scene of _Tom Burnaby_ was laid in the centre,
around the great lakes; _Samba_ was concerned with the western or Congo
districts; _Settlers and Scouts_ is a story of the east, more especially
the magnificent highland region which seems destined to become one of
the greatest provinces of the British African Empire.
The steady stream of emigration already flowing to British East Africa
is bound to swell when it is more generally recognized that in the hill
districts of Kenya, Naivasha, and Kisumu there are vast areas of
agricultural land constituting an ideal "white man's country." In the
following pages I have attempted to show some of the conditions under
which the pioneers of emigration must work. The development of
communications and the settlement of the remoter regions will soon
relegate such alarums and excursions as are here described to the
romantic possibilities of the past. But it will be long before the
lion, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and other more or less formidable
neighbours cease to be factors with which the emigrant has to reckon.
For many facts, stranger by far than fiction, concerning the wild
inhabitants, human and other, of this most interesting region, I am
indebted to Mr. Arkell-Hardwick's _An Ivory Trader in North Kenya_ and
Colonel Patterson's _Man-Eaters of Tsavo_, among several important works
that have appeared during recent years.
It may be added that in the spelling of native names I have sometimes
rather consulted the reader's convenience than conformed strictly to
rule. The name _Wanderobbo_, for instance, applied to an individual, is
a solecism, the prefix _Wa_ being a sign of the plural. But it seemed
better to err than to afflict the reader with so uncouth a form as
_N'derobbo_.