back to A Bid For Power

November 7, 1934:   the current date. Our Heroes have been in Mombasa for 12 days total. 18 days prior (October 19th), while at Suez, we were asked to look into the strange attacks by "flying tigers."

The rumor, fear, uncertainty, doubt etc around the animal attacks in the interior are not yet at the scale of the Tsavo incident (back in the late 1890s). However ...it is that memory that is raising concern quickly!  The first attacks were over 3 months ago (in September), but it has only been in the last few weeks that a dozen more disappearances were made known.

What has really stirred things up was the death of 4 King's African Rifles troops, and the mauling of 2 others. A squad from the reserve battalion of the 3 KAR out of Nairobi was on patrol investigating sightings of a group of strange armed men in the vicinity of the eastern edges of Lake Victoria. They were apparently attacked just before dawn about 10 days ago (that is, about 28 October).

Bill Davis has been told by the American consulate that the attacks are more likely the work of leopards. We are off to the Rift Valley, via Nairobi. If Our Heroes depart on the 7 p.m. daily train, we can reach Nairobi on the morning of the 8th, spend the day asking more questions and obtaining expedition-ey stuff, spend the night, and then depart on the morning of the 8th for the Rift Valley.

November 8, 1934:  while in Nairobi, Algy, Bill and some others speak with one of the surviving KAR men about the attack. It becomes clear that no tigers are involved, and probably no flying. It's also clear that lots of other hunters are out looking for the leopards. Our Heroes arrange for a truck and five porters.

November 9, 1934:  after an early breakfast, Our Heroes are driven by truck north into the Rift Valley.

the Rift Valley (1936)

We disembark at a remote farm and spend the night.

November 10 - 11, 1934:  We travel on foot. On the second day, we find the remains of two white hunters stuck up in a tree. One of them was British, Richard Talbot; the other was apparently American (from his turquoise-and-silver bracelets and cowboy boots). They have only been dead a day or less; we bury the bodies. The tracks leaving the tree are those of barefoot humans. Three of the bearers run off; we establish our camp in the ruin of an old station, about a mile from a water hole. There is some discussion of were-leopardry, are they fake, how they can be slain, etc.; Tom Fury loads some silver buckshot for our shotguns (who has them, I wonder?).

November 12, 1934:  just before dawn, several were-leopards attack! They are armed with rusty, antiquated guns, magic, and terrible ripping claws! Tom Fury is somehow frozen by their magics. The fight is quick and brutal; Captain Lotta drives off the last surviving were-leopard. Sergent Ivanov is healed of his terrible wounds by the magic traditional Chinese medicines of Qua Lin; but Captain Delacy more or less heals himself -- to the horror and disgust of the party.

MORE TO COME

the railway near Kisumu

"The building of the Kenya Uganda Railway from Mombasa to Kisumu must rank high in the top ten great railway building engineering achievements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Nakuru to Kisumu section being the most difficult with its innumerable steel viaducts over deep chasms and valleys and still keeping to a 2% ruling grade." 

the airport in Kisumu in 1936