WILD MAN AND WILD BEAST IN AFRICA 



19 



something in this coun- 

 try sufficiently interest- 

 ing to him to write him, 

 but it is a hard matter 

 to do so. 



Of course, to a hunter 

 or a naturalist, one of 

 the absorbingly interest- 

 ing features of the part 

 of Africa that I visited 

 is the enormous and 

 wonderfully variegated 

 fauna. It is literally as 

 if the fauna of the Pleis- 

 tocene had come to life 

 again. A couple of hun- 

 dred thousand years ago, 

 or thereabouts — I do not 

 pretend to be accurate in 

 geological time — there 

 was in Europe and here 

 in North America a sim- 

 ilar wonderfully varied 

 fauna of great and beau- 

 tiful and terrible wild 

 beasts. But now we 

 have to go to Africa or 

 to a few places in India 

 to find anything like it. 

 And in Africa where I 

 went the absorbingly in- 

 teresting thing is that 

 right on top of this 

 Pleistocene has been im- 

 posed the twentieth cen- 

 tury civilization. A rail- 

 road runs from the coast up to Lake 

 Victoria Nyanza, through a country 

 where man is just as primitive as our 

 cave-dwelling ancestors were a hundred 

 thousand years ago, and where men are 

 fighting practically the same beasts as 

 those ancestors of ours fought. 



I really doubt if there is a railroad trip 

 in the world as well worth taking as that 

 railroad trip up to the little British East 

 African capital of Nairobi. The British 

 government has made a great game pre- 

 serve of part of that country. On the 

 trip from the coast, Governor Jackson, 

 who had very courteously come down to 

 meet me at Mombasa, and the great Eng- 

 lish hunter Selous and I passed our time 



Photo by Kermit Roosevelt. Copyright by Charles Scribner's Sons 

 THE BUFFALO PATH THROUGH THE PAPYRUS 



on the cowcatcher of the engine, and it 

 was much like going through the garden 

 of Eden with Adam and Eve absent. At 

 one spot we would see suddenly six or 

 eight giraffe going off at their peculiar 

 rocking canter. Then we would see a herd 

 of brightly colored hartebeestes, which 

 would pay no attention to the train at all. 

 Then we would come around a curve and 

 the engineer would have to pull his whis- 

 tle frantically to get the zebras off the 

 track. The last of the herd would kick 

 and buck and gallop off 50 yards and 

 turn around and again look at the train. 

 Then we would see a rhinoceros off to 

 one side ; and so on indefinitely. 



Nairobi itself is a town of perhaps 



