16 THE BONDS OF AFRICA 



He may grow to detest the empty pleasures of 

 a hollow world, the rush and hurry of our great 

 cities will become phantoms of a ghastly night- 

 mare, and there will stretch out before him a new 

 path along the roadway of life, a path without 

 the snares and pitfalls of the highway trodden 

 by the multitudes. 



There are few men who have turned from the 

 beaten track in great, mysterious Africa who have 

 not realized that the instincts of our Stone-age 

 ancestors are not dead. They merely sleep ; and 

 there is no tract on earth wherein they are so 

 easily awakened as in Africa. 



It has been said of Africa that God raised 

 His Hand in anger and cursed it with all the 

 plagues of the universe. Yet here a man may 

 find a true joy and bury many of the ghosts of 

 the North lands, where the sky is grey and sullen 

 and forbidding. Those to whom Africa calls 

 rise from beds of sickness to answer her summons. 



In this book the more modern and European 

 cities of Africa find no place or description. 

 Johannesburg is a wonder-town with as much 

 romance and event crammed into its quarter 

 of a century as any other place on earth. But 

 it is not Africa any more than clean, well-built 

 Durban is the Dark Continent. Gold mines and 

 diamond mines have crushed out of some parts 

 of the Last Continent much of her natural 

 mysticism and savagery, and one will seek in 

 vain in these pages for those monuments to 

 Industry and Finance which modern man has 

 erected in Africa by the sweat of his brow. For 

 these things are recorded in the world's school- 

 books, and this is but a fairy tale of playground 

 facts and fancies. 



