2 
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
century, just before Speke, Grant, and Baker made their 
great trips of exploration and adventure. Behind these 
explorers came others; and then adventurous missionaries, 
traders, and elephant hunters; and many men, whom risk 
did not daunt, who feared neither danger nor hardship, 
traversed the country hither and thither, now for one rea¬ 
son, now for another, now as naturalists, now as geog¬ 
raphers, and again as government officials or as mere 
wanderers who loved the wild and strange life which had 
survived over from an elder age. 
Most of the tribes were of pure savages; but here and 
there were intrusive races of higher type; and in Uganda, 
beyond the Victoria Nyanza, and on the head-waters of 
the Nile proper, lived a people which had advanced to the 
upper stages of barbarism, which might almost be said to 
have developed a very primitive kind of semi-civilization. 
Over this people—for its good fortune—Great Britain estab¬ 
lished a protectorate; and ultimately, in order to get easy 
access to this new outpost of civilization in the heart of the 
Dark Continent, the British Government built a railroad 
from the old Arab coast town of Mombasa westward to 
Victoria Nyanza. 
This railroad, the embodiment of the eager, masterful, 
materialistic civilization of to-day, was pushed through a 
region in which nature, both as regards wild man and wild 
beast, did not and does not differ materially from what it was 
in Europe in the late Pleistocene. The comparison is not 
fanciful. The teeming multitudes of wild creatures, the stu¬ 
pendous size of some of them, the terrible nature of others, 
and the low culture of many of the savage tribes, especially 
of the hunting tribes, substantially reproduces the conditions 
