Imperial Emissaries

The crowd, chatting and milling in the red dust of Nairobi airport in Kenya, alternately looked at the skies and smoothed lapels. Titled whites exchanged greetings with African chiefs stiff in lounge suits, starched collars and shiny black shoes. Young Masai warriors, their headdresses bristling with the manes of lions speared in single combat, impatiently jangled the tiny metal rattles girding their ankles. An R.A.F. corporal dropped to his knees and gave the red-carpeted steps of a nearby dais the final whisk-brooming.

Exactly 19 hours and one minute after Britain's King, Queen and Winston Churchill waved farewells at London airport, the British Overseas airliner Atlanta touched down and the British Empire's favorite emissaries, Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh, began the first leg of a five-month, 30,000-mile tour that will take them to Ceylon, New Zealand and Australia.

Ivory Lips. For Kenya, prosperous, well-governed land of 225,000 square miles, lying squarely across the equator in East Africa beside the Indian Ocean, it was the first glimpse of a royal heir apparent in 22 years. The British colony was determined to show that here, at least, 5,500,000 natives, 100,000 Indians and 30,000 Europeans lived as partners, sharing a common loyalty to their royal rulers.

Elizabeth and Philip drove slowly past a line of jingling African chiefs, sped to a new maternity hospital. There a solemn little Negro boy named Prince (because he was born the same day as Elizabeth's son, Prince Charles) waited wide-eyed, bouquet in hand. The Princess approached. The little three-year-old forgot all the rehearsals and admonitions, and spellbound, extended his free hand instead of the bouquet. Gently the Princess, who is usually more nervous than her greeters, bent down, took the bouquet and thanked him. The watching Africans were delighted.

That afternoon, at a garden party, the royal couple met, among 2,800 guests, red-turbaned Somali tribesmen, Masai elders in monkey skins, wielding flywhisks of horsehair, and a chief who sported, screwed into his pierced lower lip, an ivory pendant as big as a billiard ball. Elizabeth had still not overcome the nervousness noted on her Canadian visit, but Philip moved easily, chatted graciously, as though enjoying every moment.

In the Treetop. At week's end, the couple drove 100 miles into the foothills of snowclad Mount Kenya for a four-day respite at Sagana Lodge, their wedding present from Kenya Colony, built of cedar and encircled by thick forest. They also planned a night's stay at nearby famed Treetops, where wealthy Europeans climb 35 feet into the air into a small, flimsy suite perched on massive figtree branches for a hushed, all-night watch on the unsuspecting elephants, rhinos, monkeys and baboons cavorting below beside a big forest pool. Though a barbed-wire barricade encircling the foot of the tree is supposed to keep the animals off, baboons easily got into the suite one night last week and ate two lampshades installed for the royal visit.

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