African Camp Fires

There are many interesting hotels scattered about the world, with a few of which I amacquainted and with a great many of which I am not. Of course all hotels are interesting, from one point of view or another. In fact, the surest way to fix an audience's attention is tointroduce your hero, or to display your opening chorus in the lobby or along the façade of ahotel. The life, the movement and colour, the drifting individualities, the pretence, the bluff, the self-consciousness, the independence, the ennui, the darting or lounging servants, thevery fact that of those before your eyes seven out of ten are drawn from distant andscattered places, are sufficient in themselves to invest the smallest hostelry with glamour. It is not of this general interest that I would now speak. Nor is it my intention at present toglance at the hotels wherein "quaintness" is specialized, whether intentionally or no. Thereare thousands of them; and all of them well worth the discriminating traveller's attention. Concerning some of them-as the old inns at Dives-sur-Mer and at Mont St. Michel-wholebooks have been written. These depend for their charm on a mingled gift of the unusualand the picturesque. There are, as I have said, thousands of them; and of their cataloguing, should one embark on so wide a sea, there could be no end. And, again, I must forconvenience exclude the altogether charming places, like the Tour d'Argent of Paris, Simpson's of the Strand, [1] and a dozen others that will spring to every traveller's memory, where the personality of the host, or of a chef, or even a waiter, is at once a magnet for theattraction of visitors and a reward for their coming. These, too, are many. In the interest towhich I would draw attention, the hotel as a building or as an institution has little part. It isindeed a façade, a mise en scènebefore which play the actors that attract our attention andapplause. The set may be as modernly elaborate as Peacock Alley of the Waldorf or thetempled lobby of the St. Francis; or it may present the severe and Elizabethan simplicity ofthe stone-paved veranda of the Norfolk at Nairobi-the matter is quite inessential to thespectator. His appreciation is only slightly and indirectly influenced by these things. Sunk inhis arm-chair-of velvet or of canvas-he puffs hard and silently at his cigar, watching andlistening as the pageant and the conversation eddy by.