In Wildest Africa ^ 



I rubbed my eyes — It had all been a dream, then ; the 

 spell of Elelescho must have inspired me with it. How 

 foolish to yield to this spell ! But men will perhaps so 

 yield to it when all this has become "historical" and 

 the Masai and their lives and deeds have, like the Red- 

 skins of America, found their Fenimore Cooper. 



Then may the spell of the Elelescho exert its rightful 

 power ; then may It make famous the slender, sinewy, noble 

 Masai ol-morani as, amidst his fair ones, his '' doiye," ^ he 

 leads the song-accompanied dance as he goes out to war, 

 and reigns the free lord of the wilderness ! But to-day he 

 bears on his brow the significant mark of an inexorable 

 fate — that of the last of the Mohicans. 



The spell of the Elelescho has departed from Lake 

 Nakuro, once so remote from the world. 



The lake is no longer remote. 



Iron railway lines link It with the Indian Ocean. 

 Vanished from it Is the spell that I once felt both waking 

 and sleeping ; gone is the poetry of the elephant herds, 

 the Masai the Wandorobo, and the caravan life in all 

 its aspects ; gone all that I saw there. The traveller, 

 if he would learn to know the primitive life and ways, 

 whether of men or of the animal world, if he would know 

 the primeval harmony that speaks to him in an over- 

 powering language peculiar to itself, must press on 

 into the wilderness farther away from these tracks. 

 This harmony, whose special character is day by day 

 disappearing, day by day is in an ever increasing measure 

 destroyed, cannot be recalled under the new, the coming 

 ^ Singular : en-dito = the young maiden. 

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