ourselves very shortly in a great forest on the side of a mountain.  Hanging creepers brushed our faces, tangled vines hung across our view, strange and unexpected openings offered themselves as a means through which we could see a little closer into the heart of mystery.  The air was cool and damp and dark.  The occasional shafts of sunlight or glimpses of blue sky served merely to accentuate the soft gloom.  Save that we climbed always, we could not tell where we were going.

The ascent occupied a little over an hour.  Then through the tree trunks and undergrowth we caught the sky-line of the crest.  When we topped this we took a breath, and prepared ourselves for a corresponding descent.  But in a hundred yards we popped out of the forest to find ourselves on a new level.  The Fourth Bench had been attained.

It was a grass country of many low, rounded hills and dipping valleys, with fine isolated oaklike trees here and there in the depressions, and compact, beautiful oaklike groves thrown over the hills like blankets.  Well-kept, green, trim, intimate, it should have had church spires and gray roofs in appropriate spots.  It was a refreshment to the eye after the great and austere spaces among which we had been dwelling, repose to the spirit after the alert and dangerous lands.  The dark-curtained forest seemed, fancifully, an enchantment through which we had gained to this remote smiling land, nearest of all to the blue sky.

We continued south for two days; and then, as the narrative will show, were forced to return.  We found it always the same type; pleasant sleepy little valleys winding around and between low hills crowned with soft groves and forests.  It was for all the world like northern Surrey, or like some of the live oak country of California.  Only this we soon discovered:  in spite of the enchantment of the magic-protecting forest, the upper benches too were subject to the spell that lies over all Africa.  These apparently little valleys were in reality the matter of an hour’s journey to cross; these rounded hills, to all seeming only two good golf strokes from bottom to top, were matters of serious climbing; these compact, squared groves of oaklike trees were actually great forests of giants in which one could lose one’s self for days, in which roamed herds of elephant and buffalo.  It looked compact because we could see all its constituent elements.  As a matter of fact, it was neat and tidy; only we were, as usual, too small for it.

At the end of two hours’ fast marching we had made the distance, say, from the clubhouse to the second hole.  Then we camped in a genuinely little grove of really small trees overlooking a green valley bordered with wooded hills.  The prospect was indescribably delightful; a sort of Sunday-morning landscape of groves and green grass and a feeling of church bells.

Only down the valley, diminished by distance, all afternoon Masai warriors, in twos and threes, trooped by, mincing along so that their own ostrich feathers would bob up and down, their spears held aslant.