The poison put on their arrows is, I believe, innocuous if merely swallowed; it needs to be inoculated in the blood to be effective.
It is quite possible that a reason for my escape may be found in the superstitious fears of the witch doctors themselves. One of the greatest assets of these men was the belief, which they carefully fostered among the natives, that any one attempting to injure them would bring some terrible disaster upon himself. If they actually believed this themselves—and by constant reiteration of the fraud they may at last have brought themselves to believe it to be a truth—it is quite likely that they feared that any attempt to injure me, whom they reluctantly admitted to be more powerful than themselves, would, in the same way, recoil on their own heads.
I may mention that the medicine men of the Fantee and Ju-Ju systems, on the West Coast, frankly admit that their arts are of no use against the white man, who absolutely disbelieves in them, so that possibly my want of faith in their mummery served to protect me from their kindly attentions and from any serious attempts at poisoning.
It should be remembered also that by “medicine” is meant incantation—that the drug is supposed to act rather through the medium of the incantation than through any potency of its own. Hence the powers of a poison to do harm would depend more on the magic possessed by the medicine man than on the power of the drug. So that a poison would have no power to injure a medicine man possessed of more magic than the man administering the drug.
After collecting more food, I went down with it again to the Government station at Naivasha, the road to which, through the bamboo forest, was extremely difficult; but when I wanted to improve the track the Kikuyu strongly objected, saying that if a road were made it would make it much easier for the Masai to raid them. As it was, in case of a raid, they could get away with their cattle through the bamboo forest. But if roads were made through the forest they would be at the mercy of the raiders. They also feared a descent by the Kalyera, another branch of the Kikuyu tribe, along the fringe of whose country I had to pass when taking supplies down to Naivasha. Where their path joined the main road into the Masai country my caravans were frequently waylaid. To put a stop to this I built a camp at the junction of the two paths, and left some armed men in charge, but they were continually being attacked, and several of them were killed.