2 
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
missionaries, 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 
We would gather on deck around Selous to listen to tales 
of strange adventures 
From a photograph by Kermit Roosevelt 
yond 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 outpost of civilization in the heart 
of the Dark Continent, the British Government built a rail¬ 
road from the old Arab coast town of Mombasa westward 
to Victoria Nyanza. 
This railroad, the embodiment of the eager, master¬ 
ful, 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. The corn- 
geographers, 
and again as 
government of¬ 
ficials or as mere 
wanderers who 
loved the wild 
and strange life 
which had sur¬ 
vived over from 
an elder age. 
Most of the 
tribes were of 
pure savages; 
but here and 
there were in¬ 
trusive races of 
higher type; and 
in Uganda, be¬ 
