The result is that to-day the Masai look upon themselves as an unconquered people, and bear themselves—­towards the other tribes—­accordingly.  The shrewd common sense and observation evidenced above must have convinced them that war now would be hopeless.

This acute intelligence is not at all incompatible with the rather bigoted and narrow outlook on life inevitable to a people whose ideals are made up of fancied superiorities over the rest of mankind.  Witness, the feudal aristocracies of the Middle Ages.

With this type the underlying theory of masculine activity is the military.  Some outlet for energy was needed, and in war it was found.  Even the ordinary necessities of primitive agriculture and of the chase were lacking.  The Masai ate neither vegetable, grain, nor wild game.  His whole young manhood, then, could be spent in no better occupation than the pursuit of warlike glory—­and cows.

On this rested the peculiar social structure of the people.  In perusing the following fragmentary account the reader must first of all divest his mind of what he would, according to white man’s standards, consider moral or immoral.  Such things must be viewed from the standpoint of the people believing in them.  The Masai are moral in the sense that they very rigorously live up to their own customs and creeds.  Their women are strictly chaste in the sense that they conduct no affairs outside those permitted within the tribe.  No doubt, from the Masai point of view, we are ourselves immoral.

The small boy, as soon as he is big enough to be responsible—­and that is very early in life—­is given, in company with others, charge of a flock of sheep.  Thence he graduates to the precious herds of cows.  He wears little or nothing; is armed with a throwing club (a long stick), or perhaps later a broad-bladed, short-headed spear of a pattern peculiar to boys and young men.  His life is thus over the free open hills and veld until, somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, the year of the circumcision comes.  Then he enters on the long ceremonies that initiate him into the warrior class.  My knowledge of the details of this subject is limited; for while I had the luck to be in Masailand on the fourth year, such things are not exhibited freely.  The curious reader can find more on the subject in other books; but as this is confined to personal experiences I will tell only what I have myself elicited.

The youth’s shaved head is allowed to grow its hair.  He hangs around his brow a dangling string of bright-coloured bird skins stuffed out in the shape of little cylinders, so that at a short distance they look like curls.  For something like a month of probation he wears these, then undergoes the rite.  For ten days thereafter he and his companions, their heads daubed with clay and ashes, clad in long black robes, live out in the brush.  They have no provision, but are privileged to steal what they need.  At the end of the ten days they return to the manyattas.  A three-day n’goma, or dance, now completes their transformation to the El-morani class.  It finishes by an obscene night dance, in the course of which the new warriors select their partners.