Word: toad
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This was the line of march: first bright Lutupen, the Samburu guide, with his spear and tribal finery, the yellow-and-black-bead cords crisscrossed on his chest, the tops of his ears sprouting the bead horns that gave the Samburu warrior, Toad thought, an air of medieval imp. Toad admired Lutupen's sense of style. Lutupen had slipped a trapezoid of broken mirror under his bead headband for decoration, so that he now had a kind of third eye, a window in the center of his forehead that flashed as he slipped along through the forest...
After Lutupen came the mule, Miss Mule, policed by another Samburu warrior named (it is true) Livingston. After Miss Mule at a cautious distance marched Toad and friends -- the guide Chrissie Aldrich, the Kitich Camp manager Ian Cameron and the others. And last, the ten donkeys that carried water and food (short rations that got shorter as the days passed and the wild walking grew more wonderful). The donkeys advanced along the trail like a party of schoolgirls in dove-gray uniforms, sociable and disorderly, the sheer din of their progress driving off elephants and lions and all other wilder...
...jerry cans on the donkeys' backs got lighter. Toad the linguist asked Lutupen in Swahili, "Wapi maji?" (Where is water?) Then after finding a few dung-fouled cattle watering holes, he learned to be more precise: "Wapi maji mazuri?" (Where is good water?) At length they fell to quarreling over water and stopped speaking to one another for hours at a time...
...pointing the march back into the mountains, on steep, thickly wooded tracks, thirsty and quarrelsome, they came upon an emerald pool in the forest, a sweet, shaded secret. Toad drank water for half an hour without stopping. That night they slaughtered a goat and feasted. Lutupen hung the remaining goat meat in a tree above him as he slept curled up on a flat rock, and in the morning Toad found leopard tracks around the camp...
...that day as Toad tramped on through the undiscovered country, his eye was suddenly transfixed by the sight beside the old cattle track of four Eveready size-D batteries lying in the dust. It was as if a passing whaleship had answered Ahab: "The white whale? Yeah, we killed him yesterday." An old joke. Toad suffered a deflation...