An open waste in the bamboo jungles of Mount Kenia. The cows and calves spend much of their time in such jungles, feeding on the succulent roots of young bamboo. Many photographic studies were made by the expedition to help in the construction of a natural habitat for the elephant group to be set up at the American Museum

tacular sport of lion-spearing. About the middle of May we trekked across country to Mount Kenia for the purpose of making studies for the setting of the elephant group.

The forests of the southern slopes of Mount Kenia are inhabited by forest elephants, who seldom if ever leave them except to make short night excursions into the gardens of the Wakikuyu natives. Wishing to learn something definite in regard to the limits of their range on the mountain, we made the ascent from the south through the timber and bamboo belts on to the snow fields at the base of the pinnacle. We found that the elephants regularly work up to timber line (12,000 feet) and we found comparatively fresh tracks in the sphagnum marshes at 14,500 or more feet.

It was while on this excursion we found the "maternity bed" of an elephant. Under the protection of a great mass of aërial roots and the foliage of a great tree on the point of a densely forested ridge, accessible

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THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL

from only one direction, there was a deeply trodden bed of dry earth where the baby elephant had been born and had spent the first week or ten days of its life, while the mother watched over it or fed on the abundant vegetation near at hand. Later we found a second bed precisely similar as to situation. These beds were well off the lines of elephant travel.

Upon returning from the summit of Kenia to the native gardens at the edge of the forest, I went back again to the bamboos to make photographic studies for the background and gather materials for accessories for the group. While thus engaged I met a bull elephant which left me much the worse for the experience and necessitated my return to the base camp on a stretcher. This event postponed work for several months and it was not until January, 1911, that we resumed active work in the field. From then until the first of June we worked in Unyoro from the Victoria Nile on the east and north to Lake Albert on the west northward of Masinde.

This district has now been closed because of sleeping sickness and thus becomes an elephant reserve. During the time we were there we saw much of the results of this awful disease, whole villages in which not a living being was to be found, those who had escaped alive having abandoned all household utensils and stored food together with the huts and gardens to the mercy of the elephants, who had come in great herds, destroyed the plantain groves and bark cloth trees, completing the work of devastation.

The elephants do not always, by any means, wait for the natives to go. We saw many cases where they had raided a garden at night and completely destroyed all crops and in some instances when angered by the natives' attempts to drive them away, had destroyed the huts also. The amount of damage that a herd of five hundred elephants can do to forests and native cultivation is enormous. In following a herd of two hundred and fifty we were led through a garden where the night previous elephants had destroyed a large plantain grove and broken down fifty or more bark cloth trees averaging a foot in diameter. This was a herd from which all good bulls had been killed and the remainder, enjoying immunity from sportsmen and ivory. hunters, had become contemptuous of man. When we approached the herd and they became aware of our presence, they surged down upon us, keeping us at a distance, and not until I climbed a tree in advance of them did I get a chance to look them over as they approached and passed. The average value of ivory in this herd would not have exceeded twenty dollars per head, not enough, to cover the damage done by them in one year.

Coming south from the neighborhood of Murchison Falls we were resting at the summit of the pass over Poduro Hills when we detected a herd of about one hundred elephants at rest some two miles to the south. As we watched them they began moving in our direction and ultimately reached the base of the hills, where we met them. In the meantime a second herd of more than a hundred appeared, traveling rapidly to the north passing within

MOUNT KENIA, AN OLD DENUDED VOLCANO OF BRITISH EAST AFRICA

Photograph taken from a position southwest of the mountain in the village of Chief Gwandero, a Kikuyu

Batian, Mount Kenia's highest pinnacle (17,007 feet) viewed from Lenana (16,300 feet), the snow dome above Lewis glacier

The glaciers are Tyndall at the left, Darwin, the small one in the center, and Lewis which is largest at the right [see cut on opposite page]. The pinnacles are Batian, the highest, and Nelion, second in size

The ascent of Kenia was made by the expedition to know the exact limit of the range of the elephant. The animals were found up to timber line (12,000 feet), and comparatively recent trails were discovered in the sphagnum marshes at 14,500 feet. The journey led from the south through the timber and bamboo belts on to the snow fields at the base of the pinnacles