WESTWARD TO LAKE VICTORIA NYANZA 
117 
tered trees or straggling brushwood. The woodland ends abruptly 
and the fields of grass run up to its very edge. Nature seems to do 
here what art does elsewhere, to produce a park-like effect. 
The top of the escarpment reached, at an elevation of about 8,300 
feet, the highest level of the railway is attained. Thence it descends 
; gradually to its terminus on the shores of the great lake, the waters 
of which may be seen from the top of a hill which looms upward about 
five hundred feet above the line. We are now again out of the tropic 
lowlands and in the lofty highlands, out of the steaming atmosphere, 
and in the crisp, chill upper air. Instead of shirt sleeves one instinc¬ 
tively turns to the comfortable overcoat. 
But as we go onward, down a steady slope, the overcoat is soon 
thrown off again, and mile by mile the train descends to tropic warmth, 
until, by the time the lake shore is reached, we find ourselves in a warm 
and damp tropical climate. Not that the lake lies at a low level. It 
occupies an elevation 4,000 feet above the sea. But the 4,000 feet we 
have descended to reach it makes a most perceptible change in the cli¬ 
matic conditions. The goal which we have had so long in view, Kis- 
umu, or Port Florence, is attained, and we see stretching before us 
like an island sea the waters of the great lake which we have sought 
so long. 
Port Florence is not the best terminus that could have been 
selected for the Uganda Railway, the location being unhealthy, partly 
from its climatic conditions and partly from the tendency of the sewage 
to accumulate in the shallow inlet. The natural terminus would have 
been at Port Victoria, where there is much deeper water. The ques¬ 
tion of cost prevented the railway from reaching this point, but this 
will have to be done eventually, unless the whole lake is deepened by a 
dam across its outlet at Ripon Falls. 
The landing from the railway train at Port Florence is, fortu¬ 
nately, not the end of civilized rapid transit in this region. From the 
wharf one may step on board a steamboat of spacious proportions and 
as neat and perfect in its appointments as if its port of entry was 
New York or Liverpool. Its low and wide decks are kept spotlessly 
clean; the crew, though of ebony complexion, are smartly dressed and 
very efficient under the command of skilled British officers; the table 
