been told by prospectors for precious minerals, who were serving in our
army, of the wonderful store of mineral deposits in German East Africa.
One noted prospector who fell into my hands at Handeni could so little
forget his occupation of peace in this new reality of war, that he
always took out his prospector's hammer on patrol with him, and chipped
pieces of likely rock to bring back to camp in his haversack. He it was
who told me of his discovery of a seam of anthracite coal in the bed of
a river near the Tanga railway. On picket he had wandered to the edge of
the ravine and fallen over. Struggling for life to save himself by the
shrubs and growing plants on the face of this precipice, he eventually
found his way to the bottom of the ravine, on the top of a small
avalanche of earth. Judge, then, of his astonishment when, looking up,
he saw that his fall had exposed a fine seam of coal. This discovery
alone, in a country where the railway engines are forced to burn wood
fuel or expensive imported coal from Durban, is of the greatest
importance. The experience of most of us seemed to be that the Germans,
in the piping days of peace, preferred elegant leisure in a hammock and
the prospect of cold beer beneath a mango tree to the sterner delights
of laborious days in thickly wooded and inaccessible mountains. One of
the first results of this campaign will be to bring the enterprising
prospector from Rhodesia and the Malay States to what was once the
"Schöne Ost-Afrika" of the German colonial enthusiast.

But big game hunting, except a man hunts for a living, as do the
elephant poachers in Mozambique or the Lado Enclave, soon loses its
savour to white men after a time. It is not long before the rifle is
discarded for the camera by men who really care for wild life in wilder
countries. Herein the white man differs from the savage, who kills and
kills until he can slay no longer. Strange it is to think that farmers
and planters in East Africa so soon tire of big game hunting, that they