The coast Negroes of East Africa are often Swahilis, descendants of Arab traders and their native wives. They have a dialect of their own and pride themselves on being more intelligent than the pure-bred Africans.
The Uganda Railroad plunges the traveller into the blackest of the Black Continent, where the natives seem people of another world. The few clothes they wear are a recent acquisition from the white men.
CHAPTER XXX
THE UGANDA RAILWAY
Travelling by railway through the wilds of East Africa! Steaming for hundreds of miles among zebras, gnus, ostriches, and giraffes! Rolling along through jungles which are the haunts of the rhinoceros and where the lion and the leopard wait for their prey! These were some of my experiences during my trip over the Uganda Railway from Mombasa to Nairobi.
Only a few years ago it took a month to cover the distance between these two points. To-day I made it in less than twenty-four hours, and that in a comfortable car. The railroad fare, travelling first-class, was fifty-eight rupees, which at normal exchange would total about thirty dollars, and I had good meals on the way. The distance is over three hundred miles, just about half the length of the railroad.
Wood-burning locomotives of the American type are largely used. The maximum scheduled speed is twenty-five miles an hour. Trains leave Mombasa daily for Nairobi and three times a week for Kisumu on Lake Victoria, which is five hundred and eighty-four miles from Mombasa.
Leaving Mombasa, our train carried us across a great steel bridge to the mainland, and we climbed through a jungle up to the plateau. We passed baobab trees, with trunks like hogsheads, bursting out at the top into branches. They made me think of the frog who tried to blow himself to the size of a bull and exploded in the attempt. We went through coconut groves, by mango trees loaded with fruit, and across plantations of bananas, whose long green leaves quivered in the breeze made by the train as it passed. Now we saw a gingerbread palm, and now strange flowers and plants, the names of which we did not know. As we went upward we could see the strait that separates Mombasa from the mainland, and higher still caught a view of the broad expanse of the Indian Ocean. For the first one hundred miles the climb is almost steady, and we were about one third of a mile above the sea when we reached the station at Voi. Here the country is more open, and far off in the distance one can see a patch of snow floating like a cloud. That patch is the mountain of Kilimanjaro, the top of which is more than nineteen thousand feet above the sea. It is the loftiest mountain on the continent yet is not much higher than Mt. Kenya, that other giant of British East Africa, which rises out of the plateau some distance north of Nairobi.
After the jungle of the coast line, the country becomes comparatively open and soon begins to look like parts of America where the woods have been cut away and the brush allowed to grow up in the fields. Here the land is carpeted with grass about a foot or so high. Thousands of square miles of such grass are going to waste. I saw no stock to speak of, and at that place but little wild game. Without knowing anything about the tsetse fly and other cattle pests, I should say that the pastures just back of the coast might feed many thousands of cattle and hogs. The soil seems rich. It is a fat clay, the colour of well-burnt brick, which turns everything red. The dust filled our car; it coated our faces, and crept through our clothes. When we attempted to wash, the water soon became a bright vermilion, and the towels upon which we dried were brick-red. My pillow, after I had travelled all night through such dust, had changed from white to terracotta, and there was a Venetian red spot where my head had lain. The wisest travellers cleansed eyes and nostrils several times a day with an antiseptic solution.