BEAUTIFUL UGANDA 
125 
eyes, while the soft, cool air seems to belong to climes far removed 
from the tropics. 
Such is Uganda, from end to end a charming garden spot, where 
food grows in abundance with the least quota of labor, and anything 
which can be grown anywhere seems to grow more luxuriantly here. 
The soil is phenomenally rich. Cotton yields an abundant product, 
and its other useful plants include coffee, tea, coca, vanilla, cocoa, 
cinnamon, oranges, lemons, pineapples, rubber, and other native or 
introduced fruits and products. Among these, of course, must be 
named the banana, that most productive food plant of the tropics, 
yielding more nutriment with less care and labor than any other 
vegetable production of the earth. From an agricultural point of 
view the banana groves form the distinguishing feature of Uganda, 
the plant being indispensable to the inhabitants. It supplies him not 
only with a nourishing vegetable pulp and a dessert fruit, but also 
with sweet beer and heady spirits, with soap, plates, dishes, napkins, 
and even materials for foot bridges. 
Passing along the road from Entebbe to Kampala, the native 
capital, one gets an idea of the delightful aspect of the country and 
also of its wealth of useful products. On both sides of the road, 
along its whole length, extends a double avenue of young rubber 
trees, and back of these are broad fields of cotton, beautiful alike when 
in flower or when snowy white with expanded bolls. It is said that 
the cotton grown here, from American upland seed, commands a 
higher price in the Manchester market than the same variety of cotton 
from the United States. 
We cannot do better here than quote a description of some inter¬ 
esting features of Uganda scenery and life from Sir Harry John¬ 
ston's “Where Roosevelt Will Hunt," in the “National Geographic 
Magazine": 
“There is a remarkable similarity about all the landscapes in 
Uganda. There are rolling, green downs rising in places almost into 
the mountains and every valley in between is a marsh. This marsh is 
often concealed by a splendid tropical forest. Sometimes, however, it 
is open to the sky, and the water is hidden from sight by dense- 
growing papyrus. 
