Chapter IT. 
party. Yet in the third year after its inauguration, the 
Uganda Railway 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 lie 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 
neighbouring 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 unknown 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 Government, upon whose rich 
pastures, dotted with umbrella acacias, graze peaceably, almost 
without fear of the train, whole herds of zebra, buffalo, gnu, 
antelope, and gazelle. Giraffes, too, may be seen peejmig timidly 
40 
