Mr. Halliday spent the next two days in surveying the neighbourhood of Mr. Gilmour’s stake. The country was all that his friend had described. The soil was rich; the river, as the natives informed him, never ran dry, though its waters were sometimes very low; and the valley was intersected by several smaller watercourses, which, though now dry, were full streams in the rainy season, so that the estate would never lack irrigation except after long-continued drought. Being well satisfied with the locality, Mr. Halliday got his men to erect a number of boundary posts about a rectangular area of some 1,500 acres, and then set off on the return journey to Nairobi to lodge a claim for a Government grant in the office of the District Commissioner. He paid his preliminary survey fee of seventy-five rupees; then, knowing that it would be months before the official survey was made, he decided to purchase stores, stock, and material for building a bungalow and out-houses, and to engage porters to convey these to the spot, and a certain number of servants to staff the farm. Formal possession of the land would be granted as soon as it was certified to be actually occupied and the balance of the survey fee, some two hundred rupees, was paid; but the lease for ninety-nine years would not be made out until the Commissioner received proof that development had taken place, which practically meant the expenditure of forty times the rent, this being twelve cents an acre. Thus it would be about three years before Mr. Halliday was definitely accepted as a settler and leaseholder, and he impressed upon John that they must both put their backs into the work if they intended to be successful. It was a month before the second safari was ready to start--a far more important caravan than the first. To begin with, there was a large quantity of stores for the use of the white men, together with seeds, root plants, and a few apple-tree slips, which by all accounts would thrive. Then there was a considerable amount of thin corrugated iron for roofing, some glass, and some ready-made window-frames, which if made on the spot would have involved too great an expenditure of time and labour. There were a few simple agricultural implements which Mr. Halliday had brought from home, guessing, and rightly as it proved, that even allowing for the cost of freight they were cheaper than they could have been bought in Nairobi. These included the "small holdings plough" of Ipswich, which had to be taken to pieces for convenience of transit. Mr. Halliday deplored the lack of roads and of bridges over the streams, which made it impossible to employ vehicles for the carriage of his goods, and prevented him from taking several pieces of machinery he would have liked to have with him. But he purchased a few donkeys, each of which could carry twice as much as a man.