14 
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
only happen to a railroad in the Pleistocene! The very 
night we went up there was an interruption in the telegraph 
service due to giraffes having knocked down some of the 
wires and a pole in crossing the track; and elephants have 
more than once performed the same feat. Two or three 
times, at night, giraffes have been run into and killed; once 
a rhinoceros was killed, the engine being damaged in the 
encounter; and on other occasions the rhino has only just 
left the track in time, once the beast being struck and a 
good deal hurt, the engine again being somewhat crippled. 
But the lions now offer, and have always offered, the chief 
source of unpleasant excitement. Throughout East Africa 
the lions continually take to man eating at the expense of 
the native tribes, and white hunters are continually being 
killed or crippled by them. At the lonely stations on the 
railroad the two or three subordinate officials often live 
in terror of some fearsome brute that has taken to haunting 
the vicinity; and every few months, at some one of these 
stations, a man is killed, or badly hurt by, or narrowly 
escapes from, a prowling lion. 
The stations at which the train stopped were neat and 
attractive; and besides the Indian officials there were 
usually natives from the neighborhood. Some of these 
might be dressed in the fez and shirt and trousers which 
indicate a coming under the white man’s influence, or 
which, rather curiously, may also indicate Mohammedan¬ 
ism. But most of the natives are still wild pagans, and 
many of them are unchanged in the slightest particular 
from what their forefathers were during the countless ages 
when they alone were the heirs of the land—a land which 
they were utterly powerless in any way to improve. Some 
