2 THE PLEISTOCENE AGE [ch. i 



plateaux, and its forests of deadly luxuriance, was 

 utterly unknown to white men half a century ago. The 

 map of Ptolemy in the second century of our era gave 

 a more accurate view of the lakes, mountains, and head- 

 waters of the Nile than the maps published at the 

 beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century, 

 just before Speke, Grant, and Baker made their great 

 trips of exploration and adventure. Behind these ex- 

 plorers came others ; and then adventurous mission- 

 aries, traders, and elephant-hunters ; and many men, 

 whom risk did not daunt, who feared neither danger 

 nor hardship, traversed the country hither and thither, 

 now for one reason, now for another, now as naturalists, 

 now as geographers, and again as Government officials 

 or as mere wanderers who loved the wild and strange 

 life which had survived over from an elder age. 



Most of the tribes were of puie savages, but here and 

 there were intrusive races of higher type ; and in 

 Uganda, beyond the Victoria Nyanza, and on the head- 

 waters of the Nile proper, lived a people which had 

 advanced to the upper stages of barbarism, which might 

 almost be said to have developed a very primitive kind 

 of semi-civilization. Over this people — for its good 

 fortune — Great Britain established a protectorate ; and 

 ultimately, in order to get easy access to this new out- 

 post of civilization in the heart of the Dark Continent, 

 the British Government built a railroad from the old 

 Arab coast town of Mombasa westward to Victoria 

 Nyanza. 



This railroad, the embodiment of the eager, masterful, 

 materialistic civilization of to-day, was pushed through 

 a region in which nature, both as regards wild man and 

 wild beast, did not and does not differ materially from 

 what it was in Europe in the late Pleistocene Age. The 



