I Am Sorry I Did Not Try Out This Heavy-Calibred Rifle Oftener
At Long Range.
It was a marvellously effective weapon at close
quarters; but I have an idea-but only a tentative idea-that
above three hundred yards its velocity is so reduced by air
resistance against the big blunt bullet as greatly to impair its
hitting powers.
We generally got back from our walks or rides just before dark
to find the house gleaming with lights, a hot bath ready, and a
tray of good wet drinks next the easy chairs. There, after
changing our clothes, we sipped and read the papers-two months
off the press, but fresh arrived for all that-until a
white-robed, dignified figure appeared in the doorway to inform
us that dinner was ready. Our ways were civilized and soft, then,
until the morrow when once again, perhaps, we went forth into the
African wilderness.
Juja is a place of startling contrasts-of naked savages clipping
formal hedges, of windows opening from a perfectly appointed
brilliantly lighted dining-room to a night whence float the lost
wails of hyenas or the deep grumbling of lions, of cushioned
luxurious chairs in reach of many books, but looking out on hills
where the game herds feed, of comfortable beds with fine linen
and soft blankets where one lies listening to the voices of an
African night, or the weirder minor house noises whose origin and
nature no man could guess, of tennis courts and summer houses, of
lawns and hammocks, of sundials and clipped hedges separated only
by a few strands of woven wire from fields identical with those
in which roamed the cave men of the Pleistocene.
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