The population of Nairobi is about twenty thousand, of which only a tenth are Europeans. Of the remainder, about a third are Asiatics from Hindustan, and the others are the queerest Africans one can imagine. I speak of them first, because they are everywhere; one stumbles over them on the street; they wait upon him in the hotels; they carry burdens for him and clog his footsteps when he goes outside the town. Many of them wear dirty, greasy cloths not more than a yard wide and two yards long. They hang them about their shoulders and let them fall down on each side, so that they flap this way and that in the breeze. Some wear breech cloths, and not a few are bare to the waist. In the early morning, when the air is still sharp, many of these people, clad in red flannel blankets, go stalking along with their legs uncovered to the thighs. I have already spoken of the ear plugs. Some have the holes in the lobes of their ears so stretched that I can put my fist through them. The loops are so long that when a man takes out his ear plug he hangs the loop of skin over the top of his ear to prevent its catching on something and tearing. The loop looks just like a leather strap about as wide as one’s little finger nail. I have handled many of them, twisting them this way and that to be sure they were genuine. [Illustration: Nairobi, on a plateau higher than Denver, is the administrative centre of Kenya Colony and a healthful place for white men. Farms are springing up about it, and there are already 2,000 Europeans in this African outpost.] [Illustration: “My room at the Norfolk looks out on a stable yard where a baby lion as big as a Newfoundland dog is tied up. He is much too playful to suit me and, besides, he roars at night.”] [Illustration: In Nairobi the popular way to travel is in jinrikishas much like those of Japan but sometimes made in America. Two good-natured Negroes man each one and sing a monotonous song as they trot uphill and down.] The African smell is everywhere. It burdens the air of the market places, and I verily think it might be chopped up into blocks and sold as a new kind of phosphate. The natives cover themselves with hair oil and body grease, and the combination of this when it turns rancid with the natural effluvia which exhales from their persons is indescribable. Some of the blacks smear their faces with a mixture of grease and red clay, and cover their hair with the same material, so that they look more like copper Indians than Africans. These Africans do all the hard work of Nairobi. They are hewers of wood and drawers of water. I see scores of them, carrying baskets of dirt on their heads and bundles of wood on their backs and pushing and pulling carts and wagons through the streets. Most of my trips from one place to another are made in two-wheeled carts hauled by wire-bedecked natives.