With Flashlight and Rifle -* 



Railway, with the result that great herds of wild animals 

 may be seen quite near the railway lines. 



On this day, to my delight, I succeeded in getting 

 some good pictures of zebras and hartebeest antelopes, 

 taken at a distance. I was the more pleased because, owing 

 to the complete lack of control over the shooting by Askaris 

 in the neighbourhood of Moshi, the whole district had 

 been practically denuded of wild life. In this Moshi 

 region, where one of the first commandants, Herr von 

 Eltz, had killed as many as sixty rhinoceroses, nowadays 

 even a single rhinoceros is seldom seen. 



You no longer see herds of a hundred zebras, such 

 as Professor Hans Meyer found here years ago. It is 

 not to the rifles of sportsmen, however, that they have 

 fallen. They mainly owe their destruction to the un- 

 checked shooting of the black soldiers, who had the 

 ammunition stores at their disposal. In 1896 I myself 

 came very near to being shot by these gentry. 



The fable about "slaughterings" by sportsmen 

 especially English sportsmen being the cause of the 

 disappearance of the fauna in lands like East Africa seems 

 impossible to root out of people's minds. 



In German East Africa, and in other unhealthy and 

 fever-infested countries, very few sportsmen, good or bad, 

 have been at work up to the present. The great 

 expense of sporting expeditions is enough in itself to 

 keep them away. 



But millions of bullets from the rifles of Europeans 

 of all descriptions, of Askaris, and, last but not least, of 

 the natives, have been whistling over the fields of German 



84 



