look out on a wide smiling grass country, with dips and
swales, and brushy river bottoms, and long slopes and hills thrusting up
in masses from down below the horizon, and singly here and there in the
immensities nearer at hand. The train winds and doubles on itself up the
gentle slopes and across the imperceptibly rising plains. But the
interest is not in these wide prospects, beautiful and smiling as they
may be, but in the game. It is everywhere. Far in the distance the herds
twinkle, half guessed in the shimmer of the bottom lands or dotting the
sides of the hills. Nearer at hand it stares as the train rumbles and
sways laboriously past. Occasionally it even becomes necessary to
whistle aside some impertinent kongoni that has placed himself between
the metals! The newcomer has but a theoretical knowledge at best of all
these animals; and he is intensely interested in identifying the various
species. The hartebeeste and the wildebeeste he learns quickly enough,
and of course the zebra and the giraffe are unmistakable; but the
smaller gazelles are legitimate subjects for discussion. The wonder of
the extraordinary abundance of these wild animals mounts as the hours
slip by. At the stops for water or for orders the passengers gather from
their different compartments to detail excitedly to each other what they
have seen. There is always an honest superenthusiast who believes he has
seen rhinoceroses, lions, or leopards. He is looked upon with envy by
the credulous, and with exasperation by all others.

So the little train puffs and tugs along. Suddenly it happens on a
barbed wire fence, and immediately after enters the town of Nairobi. The
game has persisted right up to that barbed wire fence.

The station platform is thronged with a heterogeneous multitude of
people. The hands of a dozen raggetty black boys are stretched out for
luggage. The newcomer sees with delight a savage with a tin can in his
stretched ear lobe; another with a set of wooden skewers set fanwise
around the edge of the ear; he catches a glimpse of a beautiful naked
creature very proud, very decorated with beads and heavy polished wire.
Then he is ravished away by the friend, or agent, or hotel
representative who has met him, and hurried out through the gates
between the impassive and dignified Sikh sentries to the cab. I believe
nobody but the newcomer ever rides in the cab; and then but once, from
the station to the hotel. After that he uses ricks