HERE we are in Tanganyika, the most distant possible point from our home in San Francisco; twelve hours ahead of the sunset in the Golden Gate.

We arrived yesterday in the permanent camp of Leslie Simson, on the Sironera river. This is a place some two hundred and forty miles south of Nairobi, in what was once German East Africa. The journey used to take a month by foot safari. We started four days ago from Nairobi in three automobiles. With us we took the better part of our equipment and seven natives as tent boys and gun bearers. I say gun bearers provisionally, because those boys are to carry archery equipment and not guns.

When we told Leslie Tarlton, whose outfitting firm supplies men for safaris, that we wanted boys to carry arrows for a hunting party, he had some difficulty in getting volunteers. A gun boy takes a big enough chance as it is with the average sportsman and the average African lion. They could not see the faintest possible chance of coming home safely after an encounter where the hunter was armed only with a bow and arrow.

But when it was explained to them that we would also employ native spearmen, and after they examined our powerful bows and broadhead arrows and saw how we shot them, we secured two Wakamba and one Swahili, who were familiar with the bow since boyhood. We intend showing these boys how to make tackle, and arm them with spears.

Two tent boys also joined our party, in addition to those in the employ of Leslie Simson.

So, having loaded our duffle in the light motor trucks, we left Nairobi on the overland trip south. Our route led through the Kadong Valley, the Thirst Valley and up on the high escarpments which constitute the Sarangeti Plains. A part of this journey was on dirt road and some over the simple ditched track recently laid out for the Duke of York's expedition. But most of the way was over the rolling veldt, along Masai cattle trails, across dry creek beds, or dongas, around mountain slopes, and over grass covered prairies which comprise this portion of Africa.

A few years ago when some friends invited me to join them on an African hunt, I said that I did not care to go to a country of red dirt, intense heat, smelly natives, innumerable insects and diseases.

But here we found a land of astonishing verdure; every foot is covered with grass, with scattered acacia or thorn trees throughout. Flowers bloom the year round. It is a high plateau, quite temperate in the morning, evening and night, even cold then; and hot only for a few hours in the middle of the day; otherwise a great deal like the uplands of Arizona and Wyoming. And yet this country is within three hundred miles of the equator.