AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



CHAPTER I 

 A RAILROAD THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE 



THE great world movement which began with the voy- 

 ages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama, and which has gone 

 on with ever-increasing rapidity and complexity until our 

 own time, has developed along a myriad lines of interest. In 

 no way has it been more interesting than in the way in which 

 it has brought into sudden, violent, and intimate contact 

 phases of the world's life history which would normally be 

 separated by untold centuries of slow development. Again 

 and again, in the continents new to peoples of European 

 stock, we have seen the spectacle of a high civilization all 

 at once thrust into and superimposed upon a wilderness of 

 savage men and savage beasts. Nowhere, and at no time, 

 has the contrast been more strange and more striking than 

 in British East Africa during the last dozen years. 



The country lies directly under the equator; and the 

 hinterland, due west, contains the huge Nyanza lakes, vast 

 inland seas which gather the head-waters of the White Nile. 

 This hinterland, with its lakes and its marshes, its snow- 

 capped mountains, its high, dry plateaus, and its forests 

 of deadly luxuriance, was utterly unknown to white men 

 half a century ago. The map of Ptolemy in the second cen- 

 tury of our era gave a more accurate view of the lakes, 

 mountains, and head-waters of the Nile than the maps pub- 

 lished 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 

 explorers came others; and then adventurous missionaries, 

 traders, and elephant hunters; and many men, whom risk 



