We used to visit game parks regularly when we were children growing up in Mombasa. Tsavo East was only a few hours' drive away so usually we went for the day, leaving at 3am and getting home very late.
I remember my mother buying this little book - it's about 6" by 4" and has 64 pages - at the gates of the park, where we always asked the 'askari' on duty what game had been seen recently and where.
This is my mother's handwriting in the front. That it records we were in the park for two days means that this was the one occasion I can remember when we stayed overnight, at one of the small houses at Aruba dam. The little book cost 6/50 - six shillings and fifty cents.
This is its title and that we bought the book reminds me that, before we had it, we had no way of accurately identifying the more unusual game we saw, which seems a great pity as Tsavo had a wealth of different species within its huge area.
The layout is very simple and, although all the pictures are in black-and-white, the detail was quite sufficient for us to identify the animals.
My mother wrote about that trip in her diary. We went with the Halls and the Yonges and stayed in the three houses at Aruba. The most memorable event occurred early on the second morning: we had set off from the houses for the Tsavo river when we ran into a herd of buffalo which must have numbered in the hundreds. I have only seen a comparable herd once since....
....in 2011 in the Selous Reserve in Tanzania.
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