CH. i] NATURAL ZOOLOGICAL GARDEN 15 



judice draped them so as to hide their nakedness. But 

 others appeared — men and women — with hterally not 

 one stitch of clothing, although they might have rather 

 elaborate hairdresses, and masses of metal ornaments on 

 their arms and legs. In the region wliere one tribe 

 dwelt all the people had their front teeth filed to sharp 

 points. It was strange to see a group of these savages, 

 stark naked, with oddly shaved heads and filed teeth, 

 armed with primitive bows and arrows, stand gravely 

 gazing at the train as it rolled into some station ; and 

 none the less strange, by the way, because the loco- 

 motive was a Baldwin, brought to Africa across the 

 great ocean from our own country. One group of 

 women, nearly nude, had their upper arms so tightly 

 bound with masses of bronze or copper wire that their 

 muscles were completely malformed. So tightly was 

 the wire wrapped round the upper third of the upper 

 arm that it was reduced to about one-half of its normal 

 size, and the muscles could only play, and that in de- 

 formed fashion, below this unyielding metal bandage. 

 Why the arms did not mortify it was hard to say, and 

 their freedom of use was so hampered as to make it 

 difficult to understand how men or women whose 

 whole lives are passed in one or another form of manual 

 labour could infiict upon themselves such crippling and 

 pointless punishment. 



Next morning we were in the game country, and as 

 we sat on the seat over the cow-catcher it was literally 

 like passing tlirough a vast zoological garden. Indeed, 

 no such railway journey can be taken on any other line 

 in any other land. At one time we passed a herd of a 

 dozen or so of great giraffes, cows and calves, cantering 

 along through the open woods a couple of hundred 

 yards to the right of the train. Again, still closer, four 



