THE LAST FRONTIER 



stop long enough on my plains to realize their physi- 

 cal extent nor their influence on the human soul. 

 If I mention them in a sentence, you dismiss them in 

 a thought. And that is something the plains them- 

 selves refuse to permit you to do. Yet sometimes 

 one must become a guide-book, and bespeak his 

 reader's imagination. 



The country, then, wherein we travelled begins 

 at the sea. Along the coast stretches a low rolling 

 country of steaming tropics, grown with cocoanuts, 

 bananas, mangoes, and populated by a happy, half- 

 naked race of the Swahilis. Leaving the coast, the 

 country rises through hills. These hills are at first 

 fertile and green and wooded. Later they turn into 

 an almost unbroken plateau of thorn scrub, cruel, 

 monotonous, almost impenetrable. Fix thorn scrub 

 in your mind, with rhino trails, and occasional open- 

 ings for game, and a few rivers flowing through palms 

 and narrow jungle strips; fix it in your mind until 

 your mind is filled with it, until you are convinced 

 that nothing else can exist in the world but more and 

 more of the monotonous, terrible, dry, onstretching 

 desert of thorn. 



Then pass through this to the top of the hills far 

 inland, and journey over these hills to the highland 

 plains. 



Now sense and appreciate these wide seas of plains, 



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