One must have learned the word with its sweet-sounding pronunciation from the lips of a proud, handsome, slender Masai warrior in order to understand how so seemingly slight a thing can imbue one’s impression of a whole land. The Elelescho is as prominent in those regions as the oak and beech or fir in Germany, or as the juniper, the heath, and the broom, and has the same influence on the landscape. But it has a greater and deeper influence upon the imagination, because it so dominates those solitudes, that to him who has long travelled in them the mere memory of it evokes a vivid picture of their once familiar aspect. The strong scent of the Elelescho plant leads the Masai to wear the leaves of the bush as a decoration round their ears for the sake of its perfume. It belongs thus to the plants that because of their scent are used as ornaments by warriors and maidens: “Il-käk ooitaa ‘l muran oo ‘n---- doiye ‘l---- orôpili.”[7] So there pass before us Masai maidens, and Masai warriors decked with Elelescho leaves and Elelescho branches, and received with sympathetic smiles by the caravan leaders--who, however, unlike the Masai, think very little of it. Very simple and naïve are the relations of these natives with nature around them. Only the obvious, the actually useful, comes into their thoughts, and for my black companions the Elelescho always recalls only memories of poor desert regions of the waste--regions in which they must often endure hunger and suffer many hardships. Far different is the influence of the Elelescho region on my feelings. For me this bush is symbolically linked with the plunge into uninhabited solitudes, with self-liberation from the pressure of the civilisation of modern men and all its haste and hurry. We wish to feel once more, and to give ourselves up fully to, the spell of the Elelescho--the charm of the Elelescho thickets, that are also in South Africa in the lands about the Cape the characteristic mark of the velt, now so lonely, but once alive with hundreds of thousands of wild herds. A wonderful night has come on. The moon--in a few days it will be at the full--sheds its beams in glittering splendour over Lake Nakuro.