2 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



did not daunt, who feared neither danger nor hardship, 

 traversed the country hither and thither, now for one rea- 

 son, now for another, now as naturalists, now as geog- 

 raphers, and again as government officials or as mere 

 wanderers who loved the wild and strange life which had 

 survived over from an elder age. 



Most of the tribes were of pure savages; but here and 

 there were intrusive races of higher type; and in Uganda, 

 beyond the Victoria Nyanza, and on the head-waters of 

 the Nile proper, lived a people which had advanced to the 

 upper stages of barbarism, which might almost be said to 

 have developed a very primitive kind of semi-civilization. 

 Over this people for its good fortune Great Britain estab- 

 lished a protectorate; and ultimately, in order to get easy 

 access to this new outpost of civilization in the heart of the 

 Dark Continent, the British Government built a railroad 

 from the old Arab coast town of Mombasa westward to 

 Victoria Nyanza. 



This railroad, the embodiment of the eager, masterful, 

 materialistic civilization of to-day, was pushed through a 

 region in which nature, both as regards wild man and wild 

 beast, did not and does not differ materially from what it was 

 in Europe in the late Pleistocene. The comparison is not 

 fanciful. The teeming multitudes of wild creatures, the stu- 

 pendous size of some of them, the terrible nature of others, 

 and the low culture of many of the savage tribes, especially 

 of the hunting tribes, substantially reproduces the conditions 

 of life in Europe as it was led by our ancestors ages before 

 the dawn of anything that could be called civilization. The 

 great beasts that now live in East Africa were in that by-gone 

 age represented by close kinsfolk in Europe; and in many 

 places, up to the present moment, African man, absolutely 

 naked, and armed as our early paleolithic ancestors were 

 armed, lives among, and on, and in constant dread of, these 

 beasts, just as was true of the men to whom the cave lion 

 was a nightmare of terror, and the mammoth and the 

 woolly rhinoceros possible but most formidable prey. 



