My African Journey

nery of the journey to the Lake. First in order and in rank is the Great Rift. This curious fault in the earth's surface, which geologists trace across the four thousand miles o

farther than eye can see, is the Kikuyu Escarpment. As the train claws its way downwards by slant and zigzag along its face, a majestic panorama breaks upon the view. Far below, bathed in sunshine, stretching away to misty purple horizons, lie the broad expanses of the Rift Valley.

y from the Kik

oking to the unpractised eye more like a goat than a sheep. Crossed with Sussex or Australian blood, his descendant is transformed into a woolled beast of familiar aspect. At the next cross the progeny is almost indistinguishable from the pure-bred English in appearance, but better adapted to the African sun and climate. It is the same with cattle. In the first generation the hump of the African ox vanishes. In the second he emerges a respectable British Shorthorn. The object of this farm is twofold: first, t

die. In the meantime wherever it goes the swarming ticks are infected. They hold their poison for a year. If, during that time, other cattle pass over the ground the ticks fasten upon them and inoculate them with the sickness. And each new victim wanders off

t Farm at

the face of advancing ruin. Left to itself the evil would assuredly devour the good, till the cattle were exterminated and the sickness starved to death for lack of prey. But at this moment the white biped with faculties of ratiocination intervenes from the tin-roofed Department of Agriculture; discovers, for instance, that ground may be purified by putting upon it sheep, into whom the ticks discharge their poison harmlessly and are

for the Governor and the heads of several departments were in the train, and we laboured faithfully together at many prickly things. Then at the stations came farmers, surveyors, and others, with words of welcome or complaint, and a deputation of Boer settlers with many

ibon's

ad at

which he is pursued. But I should think the most accomplished member of the Meerut Tent Club would admit that the courage and ferocity of the African wart-hog, and the extreme roughness of the country, heaped as it is with boulders and pitted with deep ant-bear holes concealed by high grass, make pig-sticking in East Africa a sport which would well deserve his serious and appreciative attention. At presen

s so trappy that one hardly cares to take one's eyes off it for a moment. Yet during at least a hundred yards at a time the whole attention of the rider must be riveted on the pig, within a few yards of whom he is riding, and who may be expected to charge at any second. A fall at such a climax is necessarily very dangerous, as the wart-hog

sh, a feast had been prepared, to which a number of gentlemen from Lord Delamere's estates and the surrounding farms had been bidden. A long array of flocks and herds was marshalled on both sides of the track in due order, native-bred, half-bred, three-quarter-bred, pure. Through th

mind to spear him, urged my pony to her top speed, and was just considering how best to do the deed when, without the slightest provocation, or, at any rate, before he had been even pricked, the pig turned sharp round and sprang at me, as if he were a leopard. Luckily, my spear got in the way, and

had walked across the line a quarter of a mile away and a quarter of an hour before. A settler who had been to lunch at Elmenteita was loading a hastily-borrowed revolver before starting on his hom

line. The creepers trail down the cuttings, robing the red soil with cloaks of flowers and foliage. The embankments are already covered. Every clearing is densely overgrown with sinuous plants. But for the ceaseless care with which the whole line is scraped an

est across a loop of the line in order that I might see what it was like inside. Through this leafy tunnel, about a mile and a half long, we all accordingly dived. There was nothing sinister in the aspect of this forest, for all its density and confusion. The great giants towered up magnificently to a hundred and fifty feet. T

be no difficulty in finding any number of natives. But they are a plaguey company. Few will stay for more than a month or two, however satisfied they may be with their work and its rewards; and just as they begin to get skilful, off they go to their villages to cultiva

this capital outlay represent the wages of four natives, to which must be added the salary of a competent white engineer, equal to the wage of forty natives, and the working expenses and depreciation roughly estimated at the wage of twenty natives more; in all the wage of sixty-five natives. Such a plant, able to cut trees six feet in diameter through in four or five minutes, to cut timber as well as fuel, to saw it into the proper lengths for every purpose with the utmost rapidity, and to transport it by whole truck-loads when

s important that the Uganda Railway should have cheap fuel. For a long time fuel alone was the object, but now that an elaborate Forestry Department has been established on the most scientific lines, there is a danger that forestry will be the only object, and the cost of fuel so raised by regul

es who live plunged in these impenetrable shades, who are so shy that, if once a stranger does but set eye upon their village, forthwith they abandon it; yet who are at the same time so teased by curiosity that they cannot resist peeping, peeping ever nearer and nearer to the fuel-cutters, until one day commercial relat

nary feature about it: where the forest areas end, they end abruptly. There is no ragged belt of trees less thickly grown; no transition. Smooth slopes of grass run up to the very edge of virgin forest, just as in England the meadow runs to the ed

Warriors

ment, and stop for luncheon by an indicator, which registers eight thousand two hundred and ninety feet above the sea-level. Southward rises

ehind-not without many regrets-and the traveller will alight upon a middle world spread at a level of about four thousand feet, in which an entirely different order of conditions prevails. Downward then at thirty miles an hour, along the side of spacious valleys, around the shoulders of the hills, across thin-spun iron bridges, through whose girders one glances down at torrents flashing far b

housand feet above it. And here the storm which had been brooding all the afternoon over the western face of the Mau Escarpment burst upon us. Even

flung from s

g fell with

steep an

e skin. But our train is an effective shelter. We dine comfortably in the midst of the tempest

ia. It possesses what I am told is the highest dockyard in the world, and is the place at which all the steamers now plying on the Lake have been put together. One eight-hundred-ton cargo boat is actually in process of construction, and will be launched in a few months' time to meet the growing traffic of the Nyanza. The station itself is pretty; its trim houses and shady trees, backed against the hills, overlook the wide expanse of Kavirondo Bay and its

lendid plumes of ostrich feathers. The Kavirondo are naked and unashamed. Both sexes are accustomed to walk about in the primitive simplicity of Nature. Their nudity is based not upon mere ignorance but reasoned policy. They have a very strong prejudice against the wearing of clothes, which they declare lead to immorality; and no Kavirondo woman can attire herself even in t

irondo Warrio

rk; dapper, white-clad British naval officers pace the bridge. We are steaming ten miles an hour across an immense sea of fresh water as big as Scotland, and uplifted higher than the summit of Ben Nevis. At times we are in a complete circle of lake and sky, without a sign of land. At others we skirt lofty coasts covered with fores