14 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



only happen to a railroad in the Pleistocene! The very 

 night we went up there was an interruption in the telegraph 

 service due to giraffes having knocked down some of the 

 wires and a pole in crossing the track; and elephants have 

 more than once performed the same feat. Two or three 

 times, at night, giraffes have been run into and killed ; once 

 a rhinoceros was killed, the engine being damaged in the 

 encounter; and on other occasions the rhino has only just 

 left the track in time, once the beast being struck and a 

 good deal hurt, the engine again being somewhat crippled. 

 But the lions now offer, and have always offered, the chief 

 source of unpleasant excitement. Throughout East Africa 

 the lions continually take to man eating at the expense of 

 the native tribes, and white hunters are continually being 

 killed or crippled by them. At the lonely stations on the 

 railroad the two or three subordinate officials often live 

 in terror of some fearsome brute that has taken to haunting 

 the vicinity; and every few months, at some one of these 

 stations, a man is killed, or badly hurt by, or narrowly 

 escapes from, a prowling lion. 



The stations at which the train stopped were neat and 

 attractive; and besides the Indian officials there were 

 usually natives from the neighborhood. Some of these 

 might be dressed in the fez and shirt and trousers which 

 indicate a coming under the white man's influence, or 

 which, rather curiously, may also indicate Mohammedan- 

 ism. But most of the natives are still wild pagans, and 

 many of them are unchanged in the slightest particular 

 from what their forefathers were during the countless ages 

 when they alone were the heirs of the land a land which 

 they were utterly powerless in any way to improve. Some 



