In Wildest Africa -^ 



are used as their money ; sudden attacks and fighting are 

 quite in the order of the day. 



And now, only ten years later, Kaiser has seen the 

 Masai at Lake Nakuro, English-speaking caricatures of 

 civilisation. 



A feeling of something like resentment comes upon 

 the traveller who has had to pay toll for his journey 

 with the ceaseless sweat of his brow, when he thinks 

 that now any one can reach Lake Nakuro in a few 

 days from the coast. It is true that the over-anxious 

 globe-trotter is kept in check by only too well justified 

 fears of the treacherous malaria and the sleeping-sickness 

 that has made such terrible progress of late. Otherwise 

 the railway journey from Mombassa to the Victoria 

 Nyanza, and then down the Nile to Cairo, would be a 

 much-travelled route. 



I have tried to describe, in brief outline, the rapid, 

 unwelcome change of our time, the result of European 

 civilisation forcing its way in. As I describe things, so 

 they were half a century ago, and even yet ten years ago, 

 when I stayed by the shores of Nakuro, and no railway 

 had yet been made there. 



To-day one can no longer find the old spell of the 

 Elelescho there, or anywhere else where the white man 

 has penetrated. 



The traveller probably sees only a shrubby plant. 



It covers many a ridge, and the lonely plains of the 

 uplands, and sends afar its spicy perfume. The botanists 

 call it Tarcho7iaiitiis caniphoratus, L. They class it among 

 the Compositae. 



84 



