These are excerpts from "The Spotted Lion" by K C Gandar Dower. Much of the book is an excellent account of the travels and location, so I have selected only those sections that relate directly to the spotted lion or marozi.

It was a few days after the end of the "Stock Safari." I was sitting in the lounge of the Muthaiga Club, Nairobi, reading that quintessence of tourism, the handbook of the East African Automobile Association. . . . I shut the book and felt more sure than ever that I had come to Africa a generation late. I would accept the invitation of Victor Mardon, a Cambridge friend who had asked me to stay for a few days on his farm. After that I would just go home. But it so happened that there was another man in the room, a Captain Ferrard, who caught animals for the London Zoo. We fell into conversation and he told me casually that he had just come from the Game Department's Offices, where he had seen two quite remarkable skins. They were lion skins or, rather, they were not exactly lion skins. They were smaller for one thing, and they were spotted all over. No, they did not belong to cubs, they looked like bantam lions. They had come from high up in the mountains. Only the skins - there were no skulls or skeletons. If I was interested I ought to go along. I went along and saw the skins and had an hour's conversation with Capt. Dent and Capt. Ritchie. In that hour I learned that one last mystery remained unsolved, that the days of discovery were not yet done. For these skins were the only piece of absolutely first-class evidence that had ever come to hand that the dwarf lions of which Raymond had spoken five weeks ago on Kenya were not "Balderdash - all balderdash" but beasts of flesh and blood.

I had better give some account of the legend of the Spotted Lion and the evidence that had already come to light when I embarked upon the quest which is the main subject of this book. No single person at the time was in possession of the facts. Some of the story I learned from the Game Department, some I heard from various individuals whom I managed to interview during the next few days, some I only gathered fragmentarily months later. But had the evidence been collected at the time, this is the position as it would have stood.

British East Africa was already so well known that anywhere except in the mountains there was barely room for any new discovery, but the higher parts of Mount Kenya and the Aberdares (a range some fifty miles further to the west) constituted great blocks of wild country - forest reserve - which were absolutely uninhabited even by natives. If you are looking for a new animal it is as well to look for it at a different altitude. A thousand feet up in height are worth many miles in mere distance, and these mountain forests had an animal life which was absolutely their own. One of the rarest and quite the most beautiful of African antelopes, the bongo, lived there: so did the giant forest hog, a monstrous pig that had never yet appeared in any zoo and which had only been discovered in 1904, two years after the okapi: so did Hook's Duiker, first named only in 1934. These mountains lay in the midst of one of the most settled areas in the colony. A remarkable paradox was thus created. No part of the land was at once so accessible and so inaccessible. Because of their situation they were easy to reach, yet because of their character they were difficult to penetrate. Geographical parties had certainly climbed Mount Kenya, but they had confined their activities primarily to the immediate neighbourhood of the icy peaks. Big game hunters had shot in the lower forest for bongo, for buffaloes and occasionally for rhinos and elephants, but the main belt of trees between the 9000-feet and 11,500-feet levels was comparatively little touched and the idea of hunting lions there had hardly occurred to anyone: it could be done so much easier almost anywhere else. Moreover, a prolonged safari in these mountains was difficult to run. It was doubtful if anyone except Raymond Hook could cope with one at all.

It was from this remarkable stretch of country that the rumours of the spotted lions came. They told of a lion, smaller than ordinary lions, one that was spotted as completely as a leopard, though of course not quite so vividly. To the natives it was a separate kind of animal altogether, as different from ordinary lions as, in their eyes, cheetahs were from leopards. Colonel Meinertzhagen - the discoverer of the giant hog - had heard these rumours as far back as 1903 and they had persisted during the following thirty years. Little attention had been paid to them until 1931, when Capt. Dent had a remarkable experience. No one could doubt his qualifications as a Field Naturalist. As Fish Warden of the Colony he spent a good deal of time in the mountains, and once on Kenya, near the head waters of the Kathita river above Meru, he came upon four lions crossing a track in thick forest at the height of about 10,000 or 11,000 feet. In the glimpse he had of them - and he only had a glimpse - they seemed to be smaller and altogether different from ordinary lions, but since he was in the middle of a herd of elephants at the time, he had no chance of investigating, and later he decided that he must have been mistaken. Some months afterwards, however, some native boys who had been trapping leopards for him in the Eastern Aberdares came to him with a strange story:

"Oh, Bwana," they said, "we caught a very odd animal the other day. It wasn't a lion and it wasn't a leopard." But when Dent asked them to show him the skin, they replied: "We didn't keep the skin. You only told us to catch leopards, so we threw it away." There was another story of a Mr. Nimmo, who acted as manager to a farm on the Kinangop Plateau, [Kinangop Plateau lies below the forest, Kinangop Peak above it] to the west of the Aberdares. Whenever he had a day or two to spare he used to go into the mountains and early one morning he and a friend encountered five strange beasts that had been eating a bushbuck he had killed the night before. He had only seen them black against the dawn, but he was positive that they were too small for lions; yet like no other beast with which he was familiar, and his experience was wide. He shot one and wounded it badly, but it managed to get away into thick bush, where it was never found.

These were a few of the many rumours which had helped to build up the story of unusual forest lions. The legend would have remained a legend and nothing more if two spotted lions had not been killed by a Mr. Michael Trent, who farmed in the Aberdares at the almost unbelievable height of 10,000 feet. He got them in a quite ridiculous way. One night he put up some snares for waterbuck which had been troubling his farm. Next morning his boys reported a waterbuck in a snare and a lioness eating the waterbuck. As they came near her she jumped up, and put her head through a second snare. In the afternoon her mate came down to see what had happened to her and was shot. Now as it happened Mr. Trent had no great previous experience of lions and no one quite realized how remarkable these skins were until they were seen by an official of the Game Department. He thought them so interesting that he took them in to Nairobi, where they had remained an enigma ever since.

As frontispiece to this book I have used a picture of one of these strange skins. They appeared to belong to lions two or three years old - the male had a whiskery mane - and yet the cub spots with which almost every lion is born showed no signs of fading.* Certain freak lions do keep their spots to an advanced age, but not in a degree comparable with these rosettes which were distributed not only on the legs and flanks but right up to the spine itself, in a manner which almost suggested that zoological impracticability, a natural cross between a lion and a leopard. The skull and the skeleton would have gone a long way to throwing light on the mystery, but, not realising the importance of his prizes, Mr. Trent had naturally taken no steps to preserve them.
[* Photography tends to emphasize slightly the intensity of spots. To the eye they appear somewhat less vivid, though, of course, as universal.]

Were these skins freaks? Did they belong to ordinary lions that, because of their abnormal environment, had retained their cub spots longer than usual? Or had lions taken to living this queer life so long ago that they had developed new characteristics? Or did they belong to an entirely new species of great cat?

[. . .] "A great black cat . . . probably a black serval or a black panther. It's too big for a serval. You must see it. Those three red rocks with the tree beside them . . . Well, take the line above. Two trees, then one big one, then rock . . . Well, just above the rock . . . There it goes . . . Oh, hell!"

I gave the landscape my attention. "Yes, I see it," I said at last. "Looks rather like a rock."

"I don't see how you can ... it's out of sight now." "Oh, I see it all right," I cried. A little later I did see it, about fifty yards to the right of the rock at which I had been staring. Once seen it stood out so vividly that I could not understand however I had missed it. A great black shape with a short tail was making its way slowly up the hillside.

"I think it is a serval," said Raymond, "only it looks too big. Possibly a black panther."

"I don't know," I said, while spotted lions swam before my eyes. "It's not as dark as you'd think. I saw spots just now when the sun fell rather differently."

But at that moment, serval, panther, lynx or spotted lion, it saw us and began leaping uphill in long, zigzagging bounds.

[. . .] At that moment something got up out of nothing at Raymond's feet and plunged downhill. We jumped from our saddles and ran to the edge of the gorge. The serval cat was half-way down the slope up which we had galloped and the pack was behind. In the grasses beyond the river they lost it for a moment. Although apparently in clear view, it was yet leaping unseen by the dogs up the further wall of the gorge. For a moment I thought it was well away. Then fatally it hid. The 'something' melted back into nothing again.

"They'll never find it," I gasped, half hoping that they would fail.

"They'll get it all right," said Raymond. "Watch them. It's rather a beautiful sight."

It was the yellow bitch this time. The others were searching a trifle wildly, but as soon as she had found the trail they started in behind. With perfect certainty she made her way uphill while we watched from our great height, like an audience at a theatre, seeing all the play but unable to interfere. Nearer they came and nearer. Wherever was the cat? At last it broke cover. Further climbing was beyond it, but still it could travel fast. It seemed to leap clean through its pursuers and plunged toward the river with hardly a gap between it and the dogs. There was something pathetic in that desperate doubling back, in that last rush downhill. It was so obvious exactly where it must end. Almost together hunted and hunters dived out of sight among the long grasses in the dip beside the stream.

"That's all," said Raymond.

It was all. We sent two boys down to call off the dogs and to collect the skin. A black serval cat is a rare beast, though not quite so rare as a black panther. Moreover, the murder did not lack scientific excuse, since there are legends of black lynxes in the Aberdares. Apart from colouring, the ordinary spotted serval and the lynx are easy to confuse and should our victim prove to be a black serval the evidence would tend to discredit the lynx theory, although, of course, the nonexistence of an animal cannot be proved until the Bognorization of a country is complete. Soon the boys returned carrying the carcase which they had found in the river. There were scarcely any marks upon the body. Whether it had died of dog, exhaustion, drowning, or bumping its head on a rock or of a combination of all four tribulations, 1 could not tell. Anyway, I was much too fully occupied in wondering how my hopes could ever have imposed this black, bedraggled, long-legged cat with the beautiful green eyes on my senses as a possible Sattima lion.

[. . .] Every moment those inhumanly competent and efficient fiends, the British Museum party, were neglecting their proper work and mowing down the spotted lions which were rightfully our discovery. I could see the zoologist leering in Palaeontological glee as he ferreted about inside a bleaching skeleton and classified an entirely new species of great cat. Still the main ridges of Sattima were behind us now. The going would be easier down the south-western ridge. In the morning bright and early we would be off, and a long day's ride would bring us to the footpath. Then we would organise a massacre of buffalo and eland, lure out a pride of spotted lions, photograph them for a day or two, shoot a male and a female, capture some cubs, and hurry down out of this grim cold world, taking a photo or two of bongo as we went. Buffalo, rhino and elephant pictures would not come in amiss. From Eburru I would dash off a special article to The Times, air mails and photos to the illustrated weeklies, ship the skins and skeletons to the British Museum, present a cub to the Zoo, sell the other to Mr. Bertram Mills, and wire my publishers that a best-seller was coming quickly. It was rather annoying in a way that we had actually chosen the rainy season in which to traverse the major portion of the Aberdares and that we had with us neither map nor compass nor field-glasses. Somehow I did not feel that a real expedition would have forgotten all these things. Still, such omissions could be hushed up or alternatively they would add spice to the too easy accomplishment of a hitherto unattempted journey.

[. . .] Hook would never question boys directly concerning the Nandi Bear or the marozi: he would talk about hyaenas, or places, or animals generally, and eventually out of a whole heap of facts which he knew already, and a whole heap of nonsense which he would never know, there would emerge, seemingly accidentally, the knowledge sought. Always it had to come spontaneously and unsolicited, for it is the most irritating feature of the Kikuyus that even the most intelligent of them cannot give a straight answer to a straight question. Time and distance are such vague terms to the native that he could not give accurate information even if he would, but if he could, he most certainly would not. For even more universal than love of food and blankets and women is his passionate desire to please the Bwana, to give him the reply that he likes best.

[. . .] The very habits of the spotted lion were unknown even to the natives, whose information was of the scrappiest.

"In these sort of mountains," Ali had volunteered by the camp fire early on in the safari, "there are two sorts of lions, you know. There is the simba and there is the marozi. I saw two, many years ago up in the gorse on Mount Kenya. They hadn't got manes and they were smaller with short legs." And again: "These marozis are not lions. There is the leopard and there is the cheetah. There is the lion and there is the marozi."

And that was all. Marozis were here, yes. Whether in the bamboos, or upon these plains or in the hagenia forests, or in the murky swampy moorlands, Ali did not know, and they were very rare, but they were here. Well, it was better to look for a needle in a haystack than a haystack in a needle. . . . But if we failed. It was terrible to think of failure, for never in the history of the world could this great chance come again. Henceforward, there would only be left the fillings-in of zoology, the petty, expert tasks to be carried out in the manner anything but grand. No, failure was terrible to contemplate.

Yet how to find this animal? How many marozis were there in this great mountain mass? Sixty? Forty? Thirty? There could not be many more. Was the spoor we had seen on the moorlands that of an ordinary lion? It had seemed altogether too big to belong to the beast we sought. And how could we tell marozi spoor from the spoor of leopards? And were the animals at which Nimmo had fired marozis after all? And were they ever to be found upon this middle plain, and if so, why had they never been seen here before except that once? Or had they been seen and mistaken for mere lions or lion cubs? Or did they usually roam the upper moorlands? Or live the life of the leopard stalking the bush buck through the thick bamboos or the uncanny hagenia forest? And if so, how on earth were we to get them out? What meat did they like? And would they, like cheetahs, refuse to come to a kill they had not made themselves? And if they came once, would they come again? Or linger beside their meat in the daylight as lions did upon the plains below? Or slink away into the thickets at dawn like the leopards they resembled? Oh, it was all so very problematical. Meanwhile we could only ride about the plains and hope that we would stumble upon them suddenly or that they would come to our three decaying water buck. Patience . . . patience. . . .

And so for four days we rode out early, and dismounted a little distance from each kill and stalked up to it expecting that at any moment a head, leonine and yet not leonine, would peer up at us out of the grass and gaze with incredulity at the white men it had never seen before. The marozi would hesitate and trot off a little, and stop a moment to look back, and decide that we were dangerous - too late. For even if we did not kill it at a single easy shot, at the sound of the rifle the dogs would spring forward and we would jump upon those disreputable ponies that could travel through this difficult country faster than any hunter, and ride it down as we had ridden down the serval cat, as Raymond had ridden down cheetahs. And at last, cut off from cover, bayed by yapping dogs, with the thunder of the horse-hooves in its ears, it would turn and charge and die. I was no sportsman now, only a collector with all the collector's cold, almost brutal, singleness of aim. If we found a lion that lion must be killed, and as a killing machine, except by the motorcar gangster business, we would take a little beating. But first we must find our lion. The relative scarcity of potential lion bait was remarkable after a safari on the plains. No clouds of shrieking vultures swooped down to call the lions out, and the nightly battle that had waged to and fro about the kills beside the Mara river simply did not take place at all. Usually we would find that our water bucks had been unvisited, or had been visited only by a single hyaena. [. . .] But those six buffalo that we were going to massacre and that long low shape, tawny or dark or light and spotted, or whatever it should be, never rose up out of the grass. We did not know what we ought to hope to see, but we knew that once seen it could not be mistaken: in that respect our task was more akin to that of the Knights of the Round Table, who fared forth in pursuit of the Holy Grail, than to the cut-and-dried hunting of to-day.

There was never any spoor in the mud by the rivers, and we came upon no newly slaughtered buck. Then as we rode the clouds would grow out of nothing around the tops of Sattima and Kinangop and the unbroken blue of the sky become speckled with white clouds. Swiftly yet unnoticeably the speckles would grow bigger and blacker until the sky was no longer a blue speckled with white but a blackness flecked with blue. Darker they would grow and thicker, until at last they came rushing together and broke overhead, and we would race for our tents and go to ground until with evening the storm had passed. Soon hopes of the leonine head became a little faint. I grew convinced that we had made a mistake, a quite natural mistake, to hunt for lions upon this central plateau. We had been misled by the ease of the hunting into an almost forgivable error. I rather foolishly suggested that we should move to Raymond, who by now had come to the same conclusion.

"Yes, I don't know," he said, reacting normally. "The lion is essentially a travelling beast. He cannot afford to remain in one district where game is so scarce. Twenty-five miles in a night is nothing to a lion. You can't tie him down correct to a couple of thousand feet."

Next day, after we had drawn our three water buck blank as usual, I had the generalship not to talk.

"Well," announced Raymond, "I think we had better move. The African lion is a parochial beast and we can now say definitely that we are in the wrong parish. We ought to go nearer to the upper forest edge."

"Oh, I don't know," I objected. "Surely we must be prepared to give the marozis time. After all, we can hardly expect results in four days."

[. . .] We began to plan that hunt with feverish concentration. We were, so far as we could guess, almost on the very spot where Nimmo believed that he had encountered marozis. Three miles north-west the forest rose for a thousand feet or so through clouds of gorse and moorland. In that forest I was sure our quarry dwelt and there horses were useless and dogs little better until they had a blood spoor for them to follow. We must abandon the method of the hunting field and lure the spotted lions on to kills. Fortunately just before reaching camp Raymond had shot a water buck. That would make two kills: if in the morning we could get an eland that would be four more. We could cut them up and load them on to our amazing ponies and plaster them along the forest edges and forest paths. Then the marozis would come or they would not. If they did not come, if we were still in the wrong parish, we were beaten. This camp, though not well placed, would have to do. However much we hated to admit it, in a day or two we might not be able to move. We might even be unable to stay.

[. . .] And then, quite unexpectedly, we tasted the first thrill of success - we found marozi spoor. There is no question about it. It had rained the evening before and very vividly on the rather muddy track were printed the hoof-marks of a small herd of buffalo, stampeding. On them, pointing in the same direction, ran the spoor of two big cats.

"Marozi spoor," announced Raymond simply. "A male and female, chasing the buffalo. The buffalo were running away, they broke off to the left just back there, and the marozis were trotting after them, keeping in touch."

It was plain even for me to see. We had often discussed what the spoor would look like when we found it, and it was just as we had expected. The female's foot-print was only the size of a leopard's, but the male's was larger than any leopard's could be, yet much too small to belong to a full-grown lion. And lion cubs do not hunt alone through thick jungle after a herd of buffalo.

[. . .] There were persistent rumours of. spotted lions on Mount Kenya above Meru. Ali himself had seen them there. The country was easily workable, he said, and he believed that we would get results there far more readily than by returning to the Aberdares. Raymond thought that he could feed up the horses, collect new boys and be ready to take the field again in rather less than three weeks . . . In my leisure I reviewed the results of our marozi hunt and found, rather to my surprise, that we had accomplished something after all. To the second-hand evidence already available we had added further confirmatory stories from Ali and certain of our other boys which, since they had never seen the two skins already obtained, must be held to carry some weight. And we believed that we ourselves had found spoor that could only belong to the animals we sought. So much for positive evidence. We no longer feared we were hunting a mythical animal. Negatively we had ascertained where marozis did not live, we had found that they were far less numerous than we had hoped, and we now knew certain pitfalls to avoid. I was growing less afraid than formerly of outside interference. The geographical party, for instance, had not only been uninterested in marozis, but had been unable to camp in the Aberdares at all. Staying at the forest station, they had begun their daily duties by climbing a 1500-feet escarpment. For the rest, according to native observers, they had mostly "stuck in poles." I began to realize that the battle might very well go on until the spotted lions or I became extinct. I did not know how long the lions had got. Speaking for myself, I was twenty-six.

[. . .] No other white man had ever bothered with Marozis. Then why should he? Couldn't he be content like other people with shooting lions on the Serengetti Plains? Kikuyus, normally capable of giving the Six Hundred points and a beating at refusing to reason why, can be driven to exercise their critical faculty by failure and high altitude. For the morale of everybody it seemed better to trek to the Amboni or the Pesi river valley.

We rode for the last time our line of half a dozen kills. The first five proved blank, and were each in turn pronounced by Raymond to be a lemon. Then 12,500 feet up, on the very sky-line of the world, among the wet tussocks and the swirling mists, we found on the circle of carefully turned-up earth the unmistakable impression of a mighty lion's paw . . . George [the name they gave to an unseen lion known to that frequent the area], for it could only be he . . . George was gone, and a leg of eland was gone with him, but the footprints stood out, clear-cut and enigmatic. Only a few hours before in the time of cold and dark a great beast had come out of the unknown, had momentarily established contact with us and, it seemed, had gone back into the unknown again. Whether this beast had been a spotted lion or an ordinary plains lion we could not tell - we rather feared the latter, for by his pads this was an enormous beast, whereas we believed our quarry to be dwarf. But if by any chance he was adequately spotted after all, it meant that he would make the finest evidence to lay before the authorities in England. A mighty male in the late afternoon of life.

[. . .] At sunset all the camp had been cheerful. Spotted Lion spoor had been found and a lion had taken meat. The work had not been futile after all. It looked very much as if in two more days all troubles would be over and forgotten in generous baksheesh. If this Bwana was offering twopence for a bug in his bed, sixpence for rhinos and a shilling for elephants observed, a dead marozi must mean fortunes for all.

[. . .] The vague outline of that famous sugar-loaf could only belong to Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in the continent, 190 miles away. We walked clumsily, a few hundred yards and basked in the warm sunshine, looking at the relief map of Africa that was spreading itself before us. We could not do much more. Next morning we went down to camp . . . No lion's roar had made the cave to thunder. The Spotted Lion Expedition had not slain its lion, and the spotted lion had not eaten its expedition. We had merely spent two nights in a hole and one in a hurricane, higher than I think any white man has ever been insane enough to hunt by waiting in a hole before. We seemed to have a genius for setting up that sort of record . . . The story of the next week's hunting is very swiftly told. We hacked our way through many a thick precipitous jungle and found traces of our two marozis not once but many times. We learned that they never came out on to the moors. Unlike George, who after all was probably just an ordinary lion, driven by white settlement into the forest, and who roamed a wide range of country, they seemed to cling to the shrubs on the upper forest edge and to the dense thickets of brambles and hagenia trees, between the gorse and the bamboos. In one such place we found the spot where they had ambushed an eland and dragged it into an even denser patch - how the poor beast had ever come to wander so far into the forest I do not know - and there for many days they had lain and fed.

We never found the signs of a full-sized lion accompanying these dwarfs, and more and more we became certain that our quarry was here if only we could get in touch with it. But to find a marozi in this country it was necessary to lure it on to kills, and kills were very scarce. Bush buck were plentiful but difficult to shoot, and it needed more than one to make a kill to which any large carnivore was likely to return. There were no water buck, and of course the kongoni and zebra that swarm upon the plains are not found among mountains. Raymond encountered buffalo once, and only once, and on that occasion he and I had separated, I taking the heavy rifle since I was exploring rhino country and he the .256 since he was not. He wounded one, which took refuge in a thicket of dense scrub, but when we brought dogs and beat the thicket from end to end, blood was found everywhere but no dead or wounded beast.

Eland were the only game available, and by a curious irony they were the only animals we were not permitted to shoot, on grounds of scarcity. We had killed two, Raymond's allowance for the year - one on the last safari and one on this. And it was for this reason we had sent the Game Department, who, we believed, knew of our activities, the following telegram: REQUIRE PERMIT SHOOT ONE ELAND LIONS NIBBLING BUT NO KILLS AVAILABLE. It was discouraging after three days' waiting to get the following reply when our boys returned from Nyeri: WHERE DO YOU WANT TO SHOOT ELAND AND WHAT AND WHERE ARE LIONS NIBBLING? The upshot of all this was that in a day or two our lion hunt had become less of a lion hunt than a hunt for the wherewithals with which to hunt. We only sighted one wherewithal a day.

[. . .] Meanwhile with the few kills available Raymond and I were still living in holes but not in the discomfort of the highest hole in history. That we had abandoned as too far from camp, as too physically exhausting to be practicable, and as likely to bring us the scalp only of George, who, we had now decided, was not a true marozi. But though we slept two more nights in holes we encountered neither the marozis we hoped for, the leopards we expected, nor the rhinos we dreaded. We had not enough kills available to cast our nets sufficiently wide ever to get a bite.

[. . .] It speedily became apparent that the sands of the second Aberdare safari were running out. We were doing no good whatever and without a reasonable supply of meat we should continue to do no good. We would have to live in this appalling wilderness six months before we might reasonably expect that luck would bring us face to face with the marozis. Even then it would probably be only a fleeting chance. Raymond's farm was calling him, our boys were feeling the strain of the work, and I was worried about business affairs in England. In the end I decided to go down to Naivasha to see if there was news for me, to get a day or two's holiday while Raymond scoured the country in a last effort to find game.

[. . .] I CAN trace a steady lowering of pride at every stage in the spotted lion hunt. In the early days I had been full of a medieval chivalry. Nothing less than single combat would have satisfied my soul; the memory of that disgraceful Mara river safari was too strong. It was some time before I began to realise that my desire for a dramatic personal climax was a selfishness of which I ought to feel ashamed, and that hunting trip ideals of sportsmanship had no place in even a pseudo-scientific expedition, but by the end of the second Aberdare safari Raymond knew that I would have rejoiced at a blotted lion, however remotely and unheroically blotted. I was prepared, like Lewis Carroll's expedition in the Hunting of the Snark:

"To seek it with thimbles, to seek it with care,
To seek it with forks and with hope,
To threaten its life with a railway share,
To charm it with smiles and soap"

though naturally I still had dreams of being in at the death.

[. . .] Meanwhile the Steam-Roller System [of large amounts of meat laid out for the spotted lions] was rumbling ponderously and, I hoped, inevitably on to victory. Within two weeks of our retreat from Sattima the siege was being pressed upon three sides. Sherwen, Masheria and I were keeping a watch upon the western sector. To the north-east Muller, a Dutchman of the thin and wiry class, maintained a free-lunch counter of five splendid kills which beckoned night and day to all good marozis. And, on the northern front, above Thomson's Falls, five-feet-two Ali, reading the signs as few Kikuyus can, was adding to the mileage of the cut-up motor tyres he always wore as shoes. We considered his district the most hopeful of all, for it was there that Trent had shot his spotted lions and we kept a special Dutchman to send up adequate supplies of meat on six of Raymond's donkeys. There was also an Englishman in general charge. His duty was to wait passively for reports and telegraph anything of interest.

I was never away from Victor Mardon's farm for more than two nights on end. My duty was to stay put, to do as little as possible, to play ping-pong, to bully Buffalo Smith; to act as the keystone of the expedition. The most important function of a keystone is inactivity: I was conscious that at no previous time in the spotted lion hunt had I been cast for a role for which I was better suited. It has been written of Gino Watkins, the greatest of modem explorers, that "his gift for sleeping was only equalled by his marvellous appetite when there was food about." During January I established claims to be a worthy rival.

Summoned from bed to breakfast on the verandah, I used to stagger out in dressing-gown and bedroom slippers to eat fried eggs and read my morning mail. A letter would have come from Raymond to say that Muller's country had "turned out dud," that he was carrying the offensive on to another mountain - Kenya - twenty miles to the west of Mem, near the Kathita River, where Dent had seen his lions. Or Sherwen would report that the leopard was still on tap or there would be a note from Trent to tell me nothing doing." . . . When I had first got the safari going above Trent's farm I had asked the Englishman-in-charge if leopards came to the kills, and in due course I received a wire saying that they had bitten. Since I now had my own leopards so superlatively on tap, this news was not of any great importance, but a few days later I decided to pay his camp a visit. Barrie's Hotel, a charming, redbrick building, constructed at great expense in English style, is the club, the meeting ground, the unofficial Poste Restante of the district of Thomson's Falls. Calling in for an early lunch on my way up to the Aberdares, I was surprised to find a note, dated the day before, from the Englishman-in-charge. I did not know whether to be pleased or horrified as I read: "The Lion is still there," it ran, "on the kill by the waterfall."

There were thirty-five miles of goodish road between me and Trent's farm, for here, alone in all the Aberdares, is the sudden escarpment replaced by a sweep of steadily rising hills. I drove furiously, exasperated that some message had gone astray, wondering whether the climax had really come; half hoping that it had not, that this was an ordinary lion. If this was indeed my chance, it looked very much on the way to being mucked already.

The Englishman-in-charge was vague, friendly, and a little apprehensive. "I thought you'd have been here yesterday or the day before," he said. "I thought you were bound to come when I told you about the leopards: otherwise I'd have wired you earlier. Oh, yes, Ah says it came again last night. I don't know what sort of lion it is, though, of course."

Ten minutes' conversation with Ali left even my linguistic barrier trampled under gesture. There was no mistaking the excitement in his eyes.

"Yes, there are marozis here all right," he said (he repeated the story later to Raymond Hook), "and they were on the kill last night. I saw them first about two weeks ago. I was walking in the woods and I met a thief. 'What are you doing here? 'I said. 'I'm working on So-and-so's farm,' he said. 'Oh no, you're not,' I told him. 'What you're doing is stealing honey.' 'Well, what are you doing yourself?' he answered, so I said I was looking for lions. 'You're not looking for marozis, by any chance?' he asked. So I said, 'No, I'm not' (it appears hardly to have been a frank conversation), 'but if there are any here I wouldn't mind seeing them, because people talk a lot of rubbish and I don't believe in them.' 'Well, if you'll look over that ridge you'll see a couple,' he replied.

"So I did and there they were. Oh, Bwana Gandar, they were just playing in the sun, doing nothing much. They were a male and a female - not cubs. They were smaller than a lion and spotted all over. Just like I said. And they had whiskers - not a proper mane - and they were lighter in build than a lion - much more like a cheetah: and if I'd had a rifle I could have shot them. And if you'd been here last night you could have shot them. They're on the kill. They've been there three nights now. Yesterday morning, going up to look at it, I saw them in the bushes only a few yards away, and they were back again last night."

I have never met a more cheerful and whole-hearted liar than Ali. He is always prepared to put up any tale or contravene any order for the good of the cause. But I had been lied to so many times that I was getting to know the signs, to tell the difference between belief and mere optimism, between real and faked enthusiasm. It was genuine this time. His eyes were sparkling for all that he stood typically and judicially on one spindly leg, the other crossed before it, the spread toes twiddling. He was wild with excitement, pleased with himself, furious with the Englishman-in-charge.

"I told him to send you a telegram," he said, "but he said he had written to you the day before about the leopards and that you were sure to come. It wasn't till last night that I could get him to telegraph. He thought it was too expensive."

It was a very little valley. Down the middle a rivulet, ten feet broad, barely a foot in depth, dived without warning or added murmur over a model waterfall, half hidden in tall trees. Beyond it an amphitheatre of low bush-covered hills hemmed in the stage - the single mighty tree, and the meat that lay tied to the gorse-bush upon its further side. I had never ceased to think of my crazy hunt as though it were a steadily unfolding tale, and I wondered whether, after all, fate could withhold a climax in such a perfect setting. This stage had surely been chosen - it could not just have happened.

Though it was only early afternoon we had come cautiously in case of lions, but the clearing was quite empty. The meat was still there - all that was left of it - and around it was spoor that did not belong to leopards. We had no doubt that spotted hons had been there the night before: we only wondered whether they would return. The E.-in-C. was perfectly sure they would.

We had no time in which to dig a hole, but the branches of the tree provided an even better hide. I had fortunately had the sense to bring a rope and at the end of an hour the flora of the Aberdares was the richer for a hammock bearing a quantity of blankets. It looked to me as out of place as a model aeroplane upon a Christmas tree, but we did great things with leaves and branches, and I took some heart from games of hide-and-seek that I had played with dogs. In a tree your scent is carried elsewhere; you have retired from the four-footed world into a new dimension.

The strange experience of sitting up was familiar by now. The sudden clamour of the boys' departure; the sudden silence that swallowed up that clamour; the softness of the dusk as it stole in beauty through the forest. Just before it was quite dark I saw an antelope advancing tensely, with many a pause, toward the stream. It was a large antelope, larger than a bush buck, proud of carriage, with finely sweeping horns; even in the half-light at a hundred yards I caught the flash of white. There is a chance that I was mistaken, but not, I think, a great chance. It is given to few Englishmen to see a Bongo.

I did not feel sleepy. My view of the kill was perfect, though a trifle distant. My torch was fixed efficiently to the rifle. If only I had practised assassination on the leopard . . .

In the morning I experienced a familiar sensation. Lions, replete, are apt to lie up one night and return next evening. I therefore stayed a second night in my tree, rather pessimistic, very tired. Clouds passed across the moon: a light misty rain ran through the forest. I buried my head under a blanket and tried to keep awake. It was morning before I opened my eyes again. Ali had arrived with the horses beneath the tree. There had been a visitor - a serval cat. Touch was lost, all chance of climax gone. It had been absurd to hope that lions would return more than three nights to such stale meat as this, as absurd as to expect a sense of pattern, of artistic values outside the story-books.

[. . .] The okapi, the giant hog and the bongo are famed for rarity, but Spotted Lions are in quite a different class. The natives of the Ituri Forest know the ways of the okapi: in the unpeopled Aberdares an expedition, lacking local knowledge, must blunder from guess to guess. Four weeks of intelligent campaigning will produce a giant hog: two of illegal practices will yield dividends in bongos, but neither friendly natives, nor intelligent working nor the legalisation of illegal practices by kindly authority can guarantee a spotted lion in one month - or two or six. The Ituri forest holds ten thousand okapis, and though the Aberdares are not so illimitable, they do stretch further than from London to Brighton. They hold at a wild guess only fifty unusual lions as against 750 bongos and 1500 giant forest bogs.

It was no use pretending that whole reservoirs of milk had not been spilt. I did not believe that another chance would come before I had to leave Kenya for home and some modification of the Steam-Roller System was necessary. Box traps seemed to be the obvious solution. They involved neither cruelty to any animal nor financial gain to myself, for spotted lions could be presented to the London Zoo, where they would play their part in the education of the race, stimulating alike the curiosity of children, the inventiveness of fathers and the grey hairs of harassed nurses. I explained this scheme to the Game Department when I was next in Nairobi, and in view of the potential scientific importance of a spotted lion, Captain Ritchie considered a special dispensation justifiable. I left his office with written permission to erect "box traps in the Aberdares for the purpose of capturing lions."

As usual I sought out Raymond: as usual he responded to the call. In the days when leopard trapping still was legal he and Ah had been professionals at the trade, and within four days of his arrival in camp a wooden contraption fourteen feet in length was bestriding the track in the glade beside the waterfall. It was "a miracle of rare device." Both in appearance and in theory it resembled a glorified mouse-trap. It was built in the shape of a tunnel whose flooring and walls were of wood, and the meat was suspended from the centre of the ceiling by the inevitable thongs of eland hide. In attempting to seize this meat the Hon necessarily would place its feet upon a loose platform, a nail would be jerked from a groove, the doors at each end would fall. If dead bait failed provision was made for live, but both from humanitarian and economical principles we took unparalleled steps for the safety of our decoy. A palisaded excrescence shaped like the Albert Hall appeared to open into the main compartment, but an intervening row of stakes converted sudden death into an interesting experience such as a goat might be proud of all its life. On the fourth day Raymond stood back and viewed his handicraft, looking more authentically than ever the head-gardener whose herbaceous border is nicely taking shape.

"Now," he said proudly, "that is really beginning to look like a trap at last."

I ventured to suggest that he had hit on the only criticism.

"But aren't you going to disguise it with branches at all?" I asked. "Surely you can't expect even the most zoo-minded animals to go walking into that."

"I can only tell you that they do," said Raymond, and the massed battalions of twenty-two years' experience in Kenya came smartly to the salute. "It is all a matter of psychology. They know perfectly well that we have put it up, but they think we've done it to keep them off our kills. When they find the way in they think they are being clever. Ali and I have caught quantities of leopards in traps like that except that we only used to give them one entrance and so they used to have to put their heads into a deep dark hole. We've built this with two ways in so that a marozi wishing to pay his respects to you won't even have to do that."

[. . .] We were up early, prospecting down-stream and there at the last possible moment before the vast rampart of Table Mountain added its steepness to the problems of the moat we found a comparatively easy crossing. It was impracticable for donkeys, but that was no great matter. The tarn and lake could be visited and mapped and photographed all in a single day: two boys could carry the little we required. That little included a basket of food for lunch, a camera, a compass and a rifle. I had insisted upon this rifle.

"What do you want it for?" the boys had asked and had smiled broadly at my reply: "To shoot marozis" - not because they did not believe in them, but because they knew my desire was as likely to be realised as is the average mother's ambition that her son should be Prime Minister. There is no inherent impossibility, but insurance companies would bet heavily against it. I smiled too. I was quite aware of the odds, but I knew that if I did encounter a marozi and I had left my rifle behind I should feel neither happy nor proud.

The Field was disposed to take the matter seriously and published two articles in which I endeavoured to give as fair an account of the position as was within my power. These articles brought me some perfunctory questions and a good deal of less perfunctory advice. They had been agnostic in tone, but the fact that I had adopted no position did not save that position from intensive attack. Unbelievers divided themselves mainly into two classes: those who knew and those who did not know that lion cubs were spotted. "Spotted Lions," wrote the former. "Don't be so ridiculous." "Spotted Lions?" wrote the latter. "Why - of course!" A mutual introduction proved by far the best defence. I received a good many other letters, helpful and unhelpful, diverse and interesting. There were the people who had seen a very spotted but otherwise normal lion on, for example, the Serengetti Plains. There were the people who didn't want to discourage me or anything, but they had hunted lions for twenty years in Kenya, no, not actually in the Aberdares. . . . There was the lady who knew a man who had met a lion that looked like a jaguar in the Virunga Mountains, and there was the lady who wanted to know why I was making such a fuss about the ordinary common or garden Spotted Lion of the Aberdares which everybody had known about for years [Her late brother, a hunter, had always held that the lion of the Aberdarea differed from the normal type.].

And there were a few whose information was of especial value: Colonel Meinertzhagen, the discoverer of the giant hog, who had encountered rumours of the spotted lions as far back as 1903, and Major Orde Brown, who had had described to him the "lion-like forest cheetah" that the natives of Embu swore lived on south-eastern Kenya; Captain Pitman of Uganda, who went to great trouble to set enquiries afoot on Ruwenzori and the Mufumbiro Mountains in the south-west of the Protectorate.

The more competent the zoologist, I found, the less he bristled with scientific scepticism. Captain Ritchie, the Game Warden of Kenya Colony, wrote of the Spotted Lions in his game report, and the British Museum were most interested in the skin of Trent's young male, which I had brought back with me to England. Mr. Pocock pronounced the skin to be that of a lion probably three years old, and held that the spots were considerably more marked than those of any lion skin that he had seen before. Naturally he could not go further until skulls and skeletons had been produced, but he told me exactly what would and what would not constitute official evidence, and encouraged me to go on till I got it.

Six months went by. Leopard after leopard was caught in the lion traps. Lions, Spotted Lions, were reported by my boys to have sniffed around these traps, to have stood at the very doorway, but they had not gone inside; I began to realise that they would never go inside, that the Steam-Roller System was developing into a Five-Year Plan. In the end I decided to go back.

The story of that visit to Africa has no place in this book. Some day perhaps I shall tell the tale of how I journeyed into the Mufumbiro Mountains whence the story had come of jaguar-like lions that dwelt in the gorilla country. Of how I climbed Nyamlagira, an active volcano that glares theatrically out into the Congo night, and picked a precarious but by no means perilous path across the crater itself between cones of molten lava and clouds of sulphur smoke. Of how after many failures Ali and I captured the first specimens of the giant forest hog, a monstrous pig five hundred pounds in weight that had never before appeared in any zoo. Of how in the end Raymond and I came back to the Aberdares and for two months hunted northern and north-western Sattima with a hideous efficiency. We made none of the blunders of our previous safaris. We operated in the manner grand. We had two other camps beside our own, each under the control of an experienced white man. Each of these camps patrolled a line of kills, shot on the plains by a Dutchman, Zacchy Crous, and transported by Hook's pack ponies into their proper places. We collected a pack of fifteen hunting dogs - a poor lot at following scent, but fearless and the best available. We constructed new and better traps, with huge doors, 8 feet by 6 feet, with walls of wire and metal rendered almost invisible by woven creepers and by live bushes planted both inside and out. We took three bugles for purposes of co-ordination and for Raymond to play with when bored, and a box of valerian for attracting Greater Cats. And we carried football nets and a deep-sea fishing net for capturing bayed marozis and giant hogs. All that the law allowed us to take we took. Every trick that the law allowed us to play we played. We fought Homeric battles with the giant hogs. We mapped rather sketchily the peak of Sattima [But less sketchily, we believe, thin out predecessors]. Our lion traps caught two buzzards, one native dog, a hyaena and at last the great George himself, who broke his way to freedom . . . no lion other than George came to a single kill, and spoor that could have belonged to a spotted lion was found only twice in all that section of the Aberdares - and that before our plaster of Paris came.

And so it is on a note of sheer futility that this story of the spotted lion ends. I have sought and I have not found: not because there is nothing there to find but because the task has proved too much for me. Somewhere amid the gorges of Mount Sattima, somewhere amid the giant heather of Kenya above Embu or Meru, somewhere perhaps among the bamboos and bogland of the Mufumbiro Mountains lives what may prove to be the last of the world's zoological wonders. Whether that wonder is as great as Raymond thinks, how far the marozi differs from the ordinary lion, I still cannot tell, but that it is there the evidence does not leave room for doubt. It makes me a little sad to think of the opportunity that has been mine, of the thrilling climax to which this book might have come. If only the Englishman-in-charge had sent a telegram, if only perhaps on some occasion Raymond or I had looked the proper way. If only in the first place I had built in the Northern Aberdares the elaborate traps which I have constructed now.

I am afraid I have made the mistake of allowing myself to dream; I have heard the thunder of the horses' hooves, Raymond's "saa . . . saa . . . saa," the barking of the dogs; I have woken up at night to hear the crunch of bones and flash my torch upon the silvery shape, half lion and yet not lion. But now for awhile I must leave Africa and face a bitter fact. I have failed to end this quest as I had hoped. All that we did has brought no climax of success, no climax of failure, just a peter out.

And yet there has been a joy in the search, in the battling with the rain and bogs, in the skirmishes with elephant and rhino, in the hunt of the giant hog, in immense distances viewed from immense heights, in light and shade striking down a forest glade, in the spur of a quest that has proved a worthy quest, above all in the friendship of a splendid man. These months have been the best of my young life and no safari of a more normal nature, however successful, could have given them to me. Some day - for my traps are still open, watched and baited, a telegram may come - some day perhaps I shall return to Africa and take up again what is surely the longest hunt for an animal the world has ever known. If I do I hope, and think, that Raymond will be there.

NOTE ON THE SPOTTED LION OF THE ABERDARES

By R. I. Pocock, F.R.S. (Zoological Department, Natural History Museum)

Several years ago I made a special study of Asiatic and African Lions and was consequently greatly interested to read in the Field Mr. Gandar Dower's account of the "Spotted" lions for which he was searching at about 11,000 feet in the forest of the Aberdare Mountains. In response to a letter I wrote to him on the subject, he very kindly brought a skin and skull on his return to England to the Natural History Museum and left them in my charge for examination and comparison with the skins and skulls in the national collection, hoping to secure additional specimens at no distant date.

A glance at the dressed skin fully justified his claim that it is a remarkable specimen owing to the distinctness of the spots in a beast of its size. It is a male, measuring approximately: - head and body 5 ft. 10-and-half in., tail, without the terminal hairs of the tuft, 2 ft. 9 in., making a total of about 8 ft. 8 in. This is of course small for adult East African lions, of which the dressed skins may surpass 10 ft. over all. From its size I guessed it to be about three years old, a year or more short of full size.

There is nothing particularly noticeable in its mane, which is small and, except on the cheeks, consists of a mixture of tawny, grey and black hairs, the longest up to about j in. in length. The mane, however, cannot be trusted as an indication of age, since some adult East African lions carry full "black" manes, whereas others, like Patterson's "man-eaters" of Tsavo, may be maneless, every gradation occurring between the two extremes. Nor does the general colour call for special comment. It is palish tawny with a grey cast over the flanks, but richer, more ochreous tawny on the mid-line of the back from the withers to the croup.

As above stated, the peculiarity of the skin lies in the distinctness of its pattern of spots, consisting of large "jaguarine" rosettes arranged in obliquely vertical lines and extending over the flanks, shoulders and thighs up to the darker spinal area where they disappear. They are irregular in size and shape, the largest measuring 85 by 45 or 65 by 65 mm in diameter. Their general hue is pale greyish-brown, with slightly darkened centres, but at the periphery they are thrown into relief by the paler tint of the spaces between them. On the pale cream-buff belly, the solid richer buff spots stand out tolerably clearly. The legs are covered with solid spots, more distinct than the rosettes of the flanks, and on the hind legs they are more scattered and a deeper, more smoky grey tint than on the fore legs.

As is well known, lion-cubs at birth generally, but not always, show a pattern of spots or stripes supposed, probably correctly, to be the remnants of an ancestral pattern transmitted from the time when lions were denizens of forests or jungles. In nearly all cases this juvenile pattern vanishes at three or four months on the body, but persists longer on the belly and legs and may sometimes be visible on those parts at maturity, especially apparently in some lionesses from East Africa. Mr. Gandar Dower's lion-skin is quite exceptional in this respect. In the large number of skins, young and adult of both sexes from Somaliland, Kenya Colony, Tanganyika Territory and Uganda in the British Museum, there is no skin like it. Nor is there any mention of the spotted pattern being a feature in a series of nearly sixty skins from various localities in Kenya, preserved in the United States National Museum and described in 1918. But the female of a pair from Masailand, described in 1895, was said to show round yellowish spots on the sides of the body, and in Rowland Ward's 'The Game Animals of Africa,' p. 423, 1908, there is a reproduced photograph of a Masai lioness, formerly exhibited in the Berlin Zoological Gardens, which appears to resemble tolerably closely Mr. Gandar Dower's specimen in the extension, size and distinctness of the pattern. But since the spots on the under side are much deeper in hue, appearing black, it is perhaps probable that those on the flanks were also emphasised by the camera.

The skulls of the pair of spotted lions secured by Mr. Trent were not preserved when the animals were skinned; but a skull presumed to belong to one of them, with all the teeth and the lower jaw missing, was subsequently picked up near the spot and submitted to me with the skin. It is a young skull with all the sutures open, showing it had not attained full size and may well be the estimated age of the skin. It is not sufficiently developed to be sexed with certainty, but I believe it to be the skull of the lioness, because the sockets of the flesh-tooth and of the canine are too short for those of a lion, but agree with those of lionesses, and because the skull itself is 1 in. shorter and 1 an inch narrower than the average of six adult female skulls from Kenya Colony. On the other hand, if Mr. Gandar Dower's supposition be correct, namely that the spotted lion of the mountain forest of the Aberdares is a smaller race than the ordinary lion of the East African lowlands, the skull in question may prove to be that of a slightly dwarfed Hon with the teeth and skull reduced to about the size of those of an ordinary lioness.

There is, as a matter of fact, some independent evidence, unknown to Mr. Gandar Dower at the time, of the existence of a small lion in Kenya. Several years ago, Messrs. Rowland Ward showed me the skulls of an adult lion and lioness received without skins or more precise locality from that Colony. Their unusually small dimensions puzzled me a good deal. The skull of the lion was less than J an inch longer than the longest lioness's skull, from Laikipia, in the Washington collection, and the same width; and the skull of the lioness was nearly 1 in. shorter and over half an inch narrower than the smallest lioness's skull, from Kapiti, in the same collection.

Since these skulls are decidedly smaller, sex for sex, than any out of the very large numbers that have been measured from many localities in the plains of East Africa, it seems probable that they came from some place in Kenya where few sportsmen have shot and preserved lions. That place may have been the mountain forests of the Aberdares; but on the available evidence they cannot be definitely associated with Mr. Gandar Dower's "spotted lions"; and from the data above set forth, it is clear that no precise conclusion can be formed regarding this interesting beast until skins and skulls of adults have been collected.

NATIVE EVIDENCE

Dear Gandar,

You have asked me to sum up the evidence from native sources about the spotted lion and I will do my best, but you must forgive me if I fail to produce anything very definite on such an elusive animal from evidence culled from such a turbid and copious spring. For it is not with any lack of ideas that I have to contend - the main thing is to differentiate what really has value from what is only good red herring. So much after long discussion merely turns out to be "around it and about" with the usual result.

But one thing does stand out pretty clearly - every native who knows anything about the moorlands of Kenya and the Aberdares does believe in the existence of a comparatively dwarf lion, more spotted than the common or garden kind, and quite definitely different. But the evidence adduced in support of this theory is always nebulous and frequently fatuous - such as: "There must be marozis or you wouldn't be looking for them." Somewhat better are stories based on what old natives have said, better still on statements of men who have seen skins of the three or four animals of this kind which have been shot. Of these you know all about Trent's specimens, and there appear to have been at least two other occurrences of similar animals - one about 1918 near the Naivasha-Nyeri track at about 11,000 ft. and one in the Eastern Aberdares at about 9,000 ft., but both these seem to have disappeared without accurate records being taken.

Plenty of Africans state, of course, that they have seen marozis, but the black is such an inaccurate observer that I can attach no importance at all to any of their stories, with the sole exception of Ali's. It is hard enough for a European to concentrate sufficiently clearly on an animal unexpectedly and probably incompletely seen to give an accurate account of it later. It is quite impossible for the African, who classes all meat-eaters together and calls them with lofty disdain "hyaenas" - unless, of course, he is romancing with a view to profit.

Ali is different. The meat-eating type of game animals have provided him with a living for many years and one usually knows and observes fairly clearly one's bread and butter. Ah's real job is leopard-trapping and I have never known anyone who can adjust a trap gun so accurately. For many years he and I enjoyed an odd indefinite trapping right in the northwest forests of Kenya, which has only recently been terminated by a change in the Game Laws which makes leopard-trapping on Crown Land illegal. And the hunting of lions and cheetahs has also received his attention as a business career, while hyaenas and jackals of every kind have frequently strayed into traps set for leopards. So that Ali, more than any other African I know, is in a position to report accurately on any of the carnivora which he encounters and, with the idea of getting him to express his views, I held the following conversation with him: -

Ali on Marozis

I began with the question, "Now about these marozis, Ali, why do we do no good with these marozis? - perhaps there aren't any - perhaps you imagined it all?" for nothing produces eloquence like a slight feeling of being unjustly accused.
ALI. No, that isn't so. There are such things.
R.H. Well, where have they hidden?
ALI. In the forest, and there aren't many anyway. I say they exist because I've seen them and Bwana Trent has killed them.
R.H. I think those were only young lions. (I said this in order to draw out his opinion.)
ALI. They may be - I haven't seen the skins - but then why do all the old men say there are lions and marozis - leopards and cheetahs? If I said this only myself, that is one thing, but what so many say is another.
R.H. Have you seen anyone lately who knows about them?
ALI. Yes - now I want to tell you if we really want marozis we must go to Embu [On South-East Kenya]. For l have heard about them there a lot lately. They call lions by one name and marozis by another.
R.H. Whom did you ask and what did they say?
ALI. First I asked, "What is a Kitanga?" and they said just a leopard, an ordinary leopard, but they say that there are also marozis and large simbas.
R.H. And marozis, where do they live?
ALI. Some visit the low country, but they don't stay there. They just take what they can get and go back as quickly as they can to their own country, which is the bamboos.
R.H. And are there plenty at Embu?
ALI. Not many, but if a man sees them two or three times, he thinks there must be a lot.
R.H. At Embu are there Wanderobo?
ALI. They are all Wanderobo - they all eat wild animals and lots of them keep honey boxes in the forest.
R.H. Do the wanderobo go up on the moors?
ALI. Some do, but not many, as they are afraid of the cold.
R.H. Do those who go say that there are marozis on the moors?
ALI. Yes, they say they're there.
R.H. Did you see anyone who knows the moors?
ALI Yes, I met one man who said he knew, but I didn't ask him much. He said there were marozis but no cheetahs in the forest - only on the plains below Embu.
R.H. Why don't there seem to be any skins of marozis?
ALI. If a man says there is something there but hasn't killed one he doesn't know where there is a skin.
R.H. How many men did you ask?
ALI. Four. Each one separately, and all said the same. I asked them carefully because why have these marozis beaten us? If we can get one we shall be all square with Gandar. What else have we failed on?
R.H. And the people of the Aberdares. What did they say?
ALI. Much the same, but they say there are two kinds, a large kind and a small kind of marozi. But I don't think so. If there are marozis there is only one kind.
R.H. And those you saw yourself?
ALI. They were like lions but smaller - but I don't think they were cubs.
R.H. How many times did you see them?
ALI. Five. The first time was the time I met the thief. They were close enough for me to see the spots, but not well - about a hundred yards away - a male and a female - they saw us and ran off.
Another day I went to look at the meat at the fall to look for a place to put meat out and there is a big game track just there and the road turns a comer, and two marozis got up close to us round the comer and I saw them well. Their size was not much greater than leopards, and the spots were easy to see. They were only about twenty-five yards off, but they got into cover quickly.
Another day we went to the top of the hill near the Melawa and we saw two run off down the hill. They were within gunshot and I saw them well.
Another day I saw two run across the track near your camp where you camped to build the first trap, but I did not see them well through the tall heather.
And one day I saw one on a track near the Melawa and this one I saw better than any as I was walking quietly. It was spotted.
R.H. You can't see the spots at a distance?
ALI. They look brownish at first but when you are close the spots show clearly. And the Embu say the same as this exactly. And they say that they only have whiskers on their necks, not a real mane like a lion. I think there are very few on the Aberdares, but there may be more on Kenya.
R.H. But if there are more on Kenya, why do we never see them when we go up the mountain?
ALI. I thought of that too, but I think they make their home in some parts but not in others. I said to some old men one day: "Why did you tell us there were lions and marozis, which used to eat people and now we find you were fooling us and there are only lions?" But they said: "No, no. There used to be lions and marozis, though now we see only lions. But the marozis are up there." They were old men from Kikuyu. Why should everyone say the same?
Now I haven't any more to say - they exist but they hide away. I think if we go to Embu we shall get them. And look at this Giant Hog business, - at first we got none but now we are getting them because we are working in the right place.

This conversation, though somewhat rambling, gives a fair idea of Ali's opinion of the spotted Hon. His description coincides with the general native belief in the existence of the animal, but he alone brings forward convincing evidence to support his views.

With regard to my own position in the book, may I be allowed to mention that you have muddled abominably, and obviously deliberately, my actual views with those I put forward merely to annoy you - but if I am to be butchered to make a Roman Holiday . . . moriturus . . .

I CANNOT very well dose this book without giving my conclusions concerning the spotted lions. It is not an easy task for anyone to assess the available evidence: it is still less easy for me to judge impartially a matter with which I have been so intimately associated over such a long period. I am therefore putting forward my views as matters of opinion rather than as fact.

I am very often asked, "But candidly, after all this time, do you really believe there is such a thing as a spotted lion?" The answer to this question is a simple one: I do. The evidence in favour includes two striking skins and the report of two others obtained in the same area, the stories of various white men, some of them experienced observers, and a widespread native belief dating back to the early days of white settlement - long before any of the skins were known. This evidence has been borne out by our own experience and by the evidence of our head boy, Ali, who has encountered spotted lions on various occasions. The failure of our expedition to yield results proves nothing one way or the other. No one doubts the presence of ordinary lions on the Aberdares and Mount Kenya, yet I have never set eyes on one of them.

The problem is not "Do spotted lions exist?" but "What are their peculiar characteristics? How far do they differ from normal East African lions?"

In view of the widespread nature of the other evidence I do not believe that Trent's skins can be dismissed as freaks (such as occur, very rarely, in the lions of the plains), and no zoologist will contemplate the possibility of a cross with a leopard in a natural state. There is no need to look for so far-fetched a solution to the problem. For the same reason, unless it is definitely proved by plaster casts of footprints or the production of actual specimens, I cannot accept a belief that the spoors differ from the normal in shape as well as in size. That would imply changes of structure which tax credulity and which are not borne out by the skins already in existence.

My own reading of the evidence, so far as it goes, is this: Lions and leopards are generally held to be the descendants of spotted ancestors. As the lion became an animal of the plains it lost its markings, but the lions of the mountain forests live in surroundings to which the leopard is adapted and, like the leopard, have retained theirs, or, more probably, have reverted to the ancestral type. The leopards of Mount Kenya and the Aberdares differ markedly from those of the plains: it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that considerable modifications should have occurred in the lion. I am inclined to believe that this is the case; that the influence of the new environment operating over a long period has produced a local race, different in appearance and size but not in other essentials from typical specimens. As against this it can be argued that normal lion cubs, brought up in shade and on an inferior food supply, would grow to a smaller stature and would retain their spots comparatively late in life. I do not believe that such fundamental changes would be produced in one generation, but until further evidence is available I cannot actually disprove it.

That evidence may never now be available, for the spotted lions of the 10,000-ft. levels are no longer segregated from the plains lions. These, driven into the mountains by white settlement, are probably interbreeding with the original inhabitants, with the result that within a few years a mixed race may evolve, combining some of the attributes of both. The whole problem will very likely remain for all time shrouded in that confusion and obscurity in which I found it, and in which I have left it.