4 
ON SAFARI 
Countless herds of big wild beasts feed within sight of 
carriage windows—brindled gnu and zebra, hartebeests 
and gazelles, with other antelopes great and small, 
giraffes and ostriches, even, by chance, a glimpse of 
rhino, buffalo or lion. But all that is a thrice-told tale. 
It is that unique railway, and the guiding star that 
led me thereto, that are the fans et origo of this book. 
Far-seeing and inspired was the genius that devised 
that line and (with the courage of conviction) carried 
out the scheme in face of the cheap rhetoric and narrow 
horizons of the hour, bounded to thousands by the 
corner of the street. Although, for the present, that 
wild fauna is actually a chief asset of our East-African 
colony, and the big-game hunter is to-day its most 
profitable customer, it is nevertheless no mere fantastic 
dream that pictures the equatorial highlands settled-up 
within measurable period by British farmers and graziers, 
the game displaced by flocks and herds, and Mombasa 
competing with Argentina and the Antipodes for the 
meat-supply of the Mother-land. 
Save incidentally, such matters do not here concern 
us. A feature that gratifies sportsman and nature-lover 
alike is the treatment of the game in the British Pro¬ 
tectorate. The Game-ordinances may not be ideal, nor 
their execution all we could wish, but they are essen¬ 
tially practical, and evince both a wise foresight and 
a policy that has raised the whole plane of sport, as 
practised in British territories, to a level that has never 
elsewhere obtained in the Dark Continent. 
Throughout South Africa hardly even the elementary 
significance of our British term “ sport” was ever under¬ 
stood or thought of. With some notable exceptions, the 
mounted rifleman of the south, with his after-rider and 
repeating Mauser, was merely a butcher, a hunter of 
hides and meat. I served an apprenticeship there before 
coming here, and remember with loathing such expres¬ 
sions as “ wiping the floor ” or “ cutting stripes through 
them” applied to some of the finest of animal forms. 
No sense of respect for game, no admiration of its grace 
