386 
African Game Trails 
that bygone age represented 
by close kinsfolk in Europe; 
and in many places, up to the 
present moment, African 
man, absolutely naked, and 
armed as our early paleo¬ 
lithic ancestors were armed, 
lives among, and on, and 
in constant dread of, these 
beasts, just as was true of 
the men to whom the cave 
lion was a nightmare of ter¬ 
ror, and the mammoth and 
the woolly rhinoceros pos¬ 
sible but most formidable 
prey., 
This region, this great frag¬ 
ment out of the long-bur¬ 
ied past of our race, is now 
accessible by railroad to all 
who care to go thither; and 
no field more inviting offers 
easy access to this new outpost of civiliza- itself to hunter or naturalist, while even 
tion in the heart of the Dark Continent, the to the ordinary traveller it teems with 
British Government built a 
railroad from the old Arab 
coast town of Mombasa 
westward to Victoria Ny- 
anza. 
This railroad, the em¬ 
bodiment of the eager, 
masterful, materialistic 
civilization of to-day, wa.s 
pushed through a region in 
which nature, both as 
gards wild man and 
beast, did not and does not 
differ materially from what 
it was in Europe in the late 
Pleistocene. The compar¬ 
ison is not fanciful. The 
teeming multitudes of wild 
creatures, the stupendous 
size of some of them, the 
terrible nature of others, 
and the low culture of many 
of the savage tribes, espe¬ 
cially of the hunting tribes, 
substantially reproduced 
the conditions of life in Eu¬ 
rope as it was led by our 
ancestors ages before the 
dawn of anything that 
could be called civilization. 
The great beasts that now 
live’ in East Africa were in 
OS! 
