AFRICA—SOUTH AND EAST 
3 
my Tope to see for myself. I voyaged homewards— 
forced by the war to the long sea route by Mozambique 
and Madagascar—oppressed by a brooding sentiment 
that I had lived too late, that those glorious scenes 
described by old-time pioneers had vanished for ever 
from the face of the earth. 
These gloomy forebodings have fortunately proved 
baseless—have been scattered to the four winds by events 
“that followed. South Africa as a virgin hunting-field 
exists no longer; yet such spectacles of wild-life as fifty 
years ago adorned its veld and karoo, with all the glory 
of a pristine fauna every whit as rich, may yet be 
enjoyed elsewhere in that vast continent. It is no 
longer to the regions beyond the Zambesi that the 
hunter must turn attention—those regions where Mr. 
Selous in my own time (since we were at Rugby together 
in the ’sixties) has earned pre-eminence among naturalist- 
hunters of all ages. No, the centre of attraction has 
shifted northwards, far northward—to the British terri¬ 
tories that lie around the equator. There some of 
Nature’s wildest scenes, practically unchanged since the 
days of creation, may yet be enjoyed. More than that. 
These new regions are accessible as South Africa never 
was at its zenith; for these new hunting-grounds are 
reached by steam all the way, on land and sea—a simple 
three-weeks’ journey by ocean liner and corridor train. 
That this renewal of virgin conditions which, it 
seemed, had disappeared for ever, should, after all, 
have been renewed to another century, followed on the 
opening-up of the Uganda railway. That narrow ribbon 
of steel (though it never reaches Uganda) pierces for 
600 miles the heart of Equatorial Africa. After leaving 
behind the coastal belt of forest and swamp, it sur¬ 
mounts a 6,000-foot mountain-range and traverses all 
the vast tablelands beyond, affording a tropical pano¬ 
rama that must be seen to be believed. Never before, 
nor ever again (it is safe to say) will there be pre¬ 
sented to the view of casual passenger such spectacles 
as to-day attend each train on that Uganda railway. 
