of breadth and space and the toil of many
days. The feeling of onward outward extending distance is gone; and that
impression so indispensable to finite understanding-"here am I, and what
is beyond is to be measured by the length of my legs and the toil of
my days." You will not stop long enough on my plains to realize their
physical extent nor their influence on the human soul. If I mention them
in a sentence, you dismiss them in a thought. And that is something the
plains themselves refuse to permit you to do. Yet sometimes one must
become a guide-book, and bespeak his reader's imagination.

The country, then, wherein we travelled begins at the sea. Along the
coast stretches a low rolling country of steaming tropics, grown with
cocoanuts, bananas, mangoes, and populated by a happy, half-naked race
of the Swahilis. Leaving the coast, the country rises through hills.
These hills are at first fertile and green and wooded. Later they turn
into an almost unbroken plateau of thorn scrub, cruel, monotonous,
almost impenetrable. Fix thorn scrub in your mind, with rhino trails,
and occasional openings for game, and a few rivers flowing through palms
and narrow jungle strips; fix it in your mind until your mind is filled
with it, until you are convinced that nothing else can exist in the
world but more and more of the monotonous, terrible, dry, onstretching
desert of thorn.

Then pass through this to the top of the hills inland, and journey over
these hills to the highland plains.

Now sense and appreciate these wide seas of and the hills and ranges
of mountains rising from them, and their infinite diversity of
country-their rivers marked by ribbons of jungle, their scattered-bush
and their thick-bush areas, their grass expanses, and their great
distances extending far over exceedingly wide horizons. Realize how many
weary hours you must travel to gain the nearest butte, what days of toil
the view from its top will disclose. Savour the fact that you can spend
months in its veriest corner without exhausting its possibilities. Then,
and not until then, raise your eyes to the low rising transverse range
that bands it to the west as the thorn desert bands it to the east.

And on these ranges are the forests, the great bewildering forests.
In what looks like a grove lying athwart a little hill you can lose
yourself for days. Here dwell millions of savages in an apparently
untouched wilderness. Here rises a snow mountain on the eq