Settlement was sparse; life followed the slow, dreamy rhythms of annual dry and rainy seasons. A few thousand European colonists, many of them well-educated Britons from the landed gentry, held dominion over vast plantation estates covering tens of thousands of acres. Their farms were home to herds of elephants and zebra, and dozens of giraffes, lions, hippos, leopards – to a culture accustomed to the traditional pleasures of European aristocrats, Kenya was a hunter's dream. Blixen herself commented in 1960 that when she arrived in Kenya in 1914, “the highlands were in very truth the Happy Hunting Grounds… while the pioneers lived in guileless harmony with the children of the land.”