Speaking of ornaments, one very characteristic feature of Kikuyu adornment is the enormous size of their ear appendages—they cannot be called earrings. When the children are quite young a hole is made in the lobe of the ear, similar to the fashion in Europe of piercing the lobe for earrings. But they are not content with the comparatively small ornaments that satisfy the vanity of European women: their ambition is to have the ear ornament as large as they can possibly manage; so the hole in the lobe of the ear is distended by means of a series of wooden pegs, gradually increasing in size until it is large enough to allow of the insertion of a jam-jar or condensed milk tin, which are by no means unusual ornaments for a native to be seen wearing in the ear. And very proud they are as they go about wearing these extraordinary adornments, which one would think must be decidedly uncomfortable for the wearers; they certainly appear so to European eyes, but the natives do not seem to consider them so, and are quite satisfied with the effect. I do not think that I have mentioned that the Kikuyu cultivate a large amount of tobacco from which to make snuff, for, although they do not smoke, all the men take snuff. Many of the other tribes grow tobacco, but not to such an extent as the Kikuyu, who know better how to cure it than any of their neighbours; in fact, the Kikuyu tobacco has such a reputation in the country that to my surprise I found that the natives about Lake Rudolph, and even right round as far as Abyssinia, were inquiring for Kikuyu tobacco. The most striking incidents of my life at this time while I was living among the Kikuyu were occurrences which took place on some of the journeys down to Naivasha with the caravans taking in food. On two occasions while marching down I had people killed by elephants, which were fairly numerous in the bamboo forest at certain times of the year. With a safari of a thousand men the long line of porters extended for about five or six miles, winding through the forest like a huge serpent and tailing away into the distance; and occasionally, when an elephant crossed the path, one of the stragglers in the rear would find himself suddenly encircled round the body by an elephant’s trunk and hurled several feet in the air, to be trampled to death under the ponderous brute’s feet when his body crashed to the ground again. The porters nearest to him would then set up a shout, which was repeated all along the line until it reached me, when I would immediately rush back as quickly as possible, only to find, when I at length reached the spot, that the elephant had been lost in the forest long before I got there, the bamboos growing so thickly that it could not be seen for any great distance. Incidents of this sort happened on two occasions on the road to Naivasha.