2 
THE PLEISTOCENE AGE [ch. i 
plateaux, and its forests of deadly luxuriance, was 
utterly unknown to white men half a century ago. The 
map of Ptolemy in the second century of our era gave 
a more accurate view of the lakes, mountains, and head¬ 
waters of the Nile than the maps published at the 
beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century, 
just before Speke, Grant, and Baker made their great 
trips of exploration and adventure. Behind these ex¬ 
plorers came others ; and then adventurous mission¬ 
aries, 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 reason, now for another, now as naturalists, 
now as geographers, 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 established a protectorate ; and 
ultimately, in order to get easy access to this new out¬ 
post 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 Age. The 
DSi 
