This favoured land produces a superabundance of material enjoyments of a tangible kind. Fat cattle, sheep and goats, poultry, dainty fishes from the Jipé lake and the Lumi river, specially dainty game of a thousand kinds from the banks of the smaller mountain-streams which flow down the sides of the Kilimanjaro, satisfy the most insatiable longing for flesh food. The vegetable kingdom pours forth not less lavishly from its horn of plenty a supply of almost all the wild and cultivated fruits and garden-produce of the tropics. At the same time everything is so cheap that the most extravagant glutton could not exceed a daily consumption costing more than a penny or two, even should the courteous and hospitable Wa-Taveta accept payment at all--which, however, they seldom did from us. It is true that the fame of our heroic deeds against the Masai had gone before us, and particularly the assurance that we had delivered Taveta from these unwelcome guests, who, it is true, had hitherto been kept away on every attack by the impenetrable forest fastnesses of Kilima, but whose neighbourhood was nevertheless very troublesome. Besides, our hands were ever open to the men of Taveta, and still more generously to the women. European goods of all kinds, articles of clothing, primitive ornaments, and especially a selection of photographs and Munich coloured picture-sheets, won the hearts of our black hosts, so that when, on the morning of the 23rd of May, we at last set out on our way, we were as sorry to leave this splendid woodland district as the Wa-Taveta were to lose us. These good simple-minded men accompanied us over their frontier; and many of the by no means ill-looking Taveta girls, who had lost their hearts to their white or their Swahili guests, shed bitter tears, and told their woe preferably to our two ladies, who fortunately did not understand a word of these effusive demonstrations of the Tavetan female heart. Prudery is an unknown thing in Equatorial Africa; and the Taveta fair ones would have been as little able to understand why anyone should think it wrong to open one's heart to a guest as their white sisters would have been to conceive of the possibility of talking freely and in all innocence of such matters without giving the least offence to friends and relatives. CHAPTER IV There are two routes from Taveta to Masailand, one leading westward past Kilima through the territory of the Wa-Kwafi, the other along the eastern slopes of the mountain through the lands occupied by the various tribes of the Wa-Chaga.