In those days—to parody a line of Holy Writ—it might be said, "To every man, a crater or two"; if you were referring to the wilderness which lay between Kilimanjaro and the southern Rift Valleys, and to the strange adventurers who in the ’nineties ranged up and down the East African interior between Baringo on the north and the Happy Valley on the south, over a region of elevated steppe land, isolated mountains of immense height, and extinct volcanoes. Some of these lawless men were accumulating considerable wealth in ivory, sheep and cattle. They wanted fortresses in which to live and store their plunder, or the spoil of their chase, the elephant tusks, the rhino horns, the lion and leopard skins, the black and white mantles of the long-haired colobus monkeys, the ostrich plumes; even the roughly-cured skins of the rosy flamingoes which were becoming an article of great demand in the plumage trade. For this purpose the large and small craters of presumably extinct volcanoes were ready to hand; as though Nature had anticipated their wants. Most of these were surrounded on the inside by the nearly continuous, circular wall of the crater, only broken down at one point where the lava or nowadays a stream of water (the overflow of a little crater lake) issued from the crater floor. Here with piled stones it was easy to restrict the gap and hold the entrance against any savage enemy without artillery. These defences were, of course, prepared against the Masai and not with any idea of defying a White Government, whose advent at that time seemed very problematical: at any rate a White Government that would interfere to protect the natives, to obstruct elephant killing, or regulate the movements of cattle between a disease-infected area and one that still possessed uninfected flocks and herds. It was to one of these craters—very red in colour—that Roger Brentham rode up at the end of March, 1897, after three days’ difficult journey from the south. He halted his little _safari_ of armed porters and his four Somali gun-men on a level tableland in front of the gap in the crater walls; a gap cleverly closed by a huge door of yew planks and a bridge of yew trunks thrown over the issuing brook, with stones piled on top to a height of twenty feet. There were obvious indications that the walls and woodwork were loopholed for gun-fire. He called several times loudly in Swahili and German to arouse an answer and rapped on the cumbrous door. Presently a smaller door within the great one opened and there emerged a sullen-looking negro giant, probably a Makua from the south. [Such offer themselves for service in Unguja.] "Unatakáje?" he asked in Swahili. "I want to see your Bwana—I do not know his ’native’ name," said Brentham, "but just take this ’karata’ to him and he will read my name; and say I wish to see him. Meantime I will make a camp here."