AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
CHAPTER I 
A RAILROAD THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE 
The great world movement which began with the voy¬ 
ages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama, and which has gone 
on with ever-increasing rapidity and complexity until our 
own time, has developed along a myriad lines of interest. In 
no way has it been more interesting than in the way in which 
it has brought into sudden, violent, and intimate contact 
phases of the world’s life history which would normally be 
separated by untold centuries of slow development. Again 
and again, in the continents new to peoples of European 
stock, we have seen the spectacle of a high civilization all 
at once thrust into and superimposed upon a wilderness of 
savage men and savage beasts. Nowhere, and at no time, 
has the contrast been more strange and more striking than 
in British East Africa during the last dozen years. 
The country lies directly under the equator; and the 
hinterland, due west, contains the huge Nyanza lakes, vast 
inland seas which gather the head-waters of the White Nile. 
This hinterland, with its lakes and its marshes, its snow¬ 
capped mountains, its high, dry plateaus, and its forests 
of deadly luxuriance, was utterly unknown to white men 
half a century ago. The map of Ptolemy in the second cen¬ 
tury of our era gave a more accurate view of the lakes, 
mountains, and head-waters of the Nile than the maps pub¬ 
lished at the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth 
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