Chapter IT. 



party. Yet in the third year after its inauguration, the 

 Uganda Raihvay counted 179,000 passengers. 



A European, landed for the first time in Africa, must 

 experience a strange sensation on finding himself suddenly 

 transported by railway into the very midst of a landscape, 

 where every feature, people, animals and plants unite to form the 

 picture which he had so often attempted to create by imagination. 



Immediately after crossing the bridge that joins Mombasa 

 to the continent, the railway begins its ascent to the tableland, 

 passing first through fields of mango, cocoanut, banana and all 

 the beautiful vegetation of the coast zone ; next, through the 

 undulating and bare plains of the Taru desert, where thorny 

 bushes and a few euphorbias are the only plants ; then once 

 more through a fertile country among flowering fields and 

 woodlands. 



The stations, placed at intervals of 20 miles from one 

 another, consist each of a little wooden hut, beside a shed 

 standing alone in the wilderness. Every 100 miles is a central 

 station. Here the natives collect in numbers from the 

 neiglibouring villages to sell sugar-cane and bananas to the 

 third-class passengers. 



The train continues to climb by a gentle grade, and the 

 snowy peaks of Kilimandjaro become visible to the south. The 

 landscape is monotonous, and the country infested by the 

 tsetse-fly. A little further on, for reasons unknowji to us, 

 the dangerous insect disappears, and a veritable Eden opens to 

 the view of the traveller. This is the Tableland of Athi, the 

 famous game preserve of the Governmejit, upon whose rich 

 pastures, dotted with mnbrella acacias, graze peaceably, almost 

 without fear of the train, whole herds of zebra, buflido, gnu, 

 antelope, and gazelle. Giraffes, too, may be seen peeping timidly 



40 



