AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
CHAPTER I 
A RAILROAD THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE 
The great world movement which began with the 
voyages 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 
l 
