But what a way to cut fuel! A floating population of clumsy barbarians pecking at the trees with native choppers more like a toy hoe than an axe, and carrying their loads when completed a quarter of a mile on their heads to the wood-stack, while the forest laughs at the feebleness of man. I made a calculation. Each of the nine hundred natives employed costs on the whole six pounds a year. The price of a steam tree-felling plant, with a mile of mono-rail tram complete, is about five hundred pounds. The interest and sinking fund on this capital outlay represent the wages of four natives, to which must be added the salary of a competent white engineer, equal to the wage of forty natives, and the working expenses and depreciation roughly estimated at the wage of twenty natives more; in all the wage of sixty-five natives. Such a plant, able to cut trees six feet in diameter through in four or five minutes, to cut timber as well as fuel, to saw it into the proper lengths for every purpose with the utmost rapidity, and to transport it by whole truck-loads when sawn to the railway siding, would accomplish a week's work of the sixty-five natives it replaced in a single day, and effect a sevenfold multiplication of power. It is no good trying to lay hold of Tropical Africa with naked fingers. Civilization must be armed with machinery if she is to subdue these wild regions to her authority. Iron roads, not jogging porters; tireless engines, not weary men; cheap power, not cheap labour; steam and skill, not sweat and fumbling: there lies the only way to tame the jungle—more jungles than one.
On this we talked—or at least I talked—while we scrambled across the stumps of fallen trees or waded in an emerald twilight from one sunbeam to another across the creeper flood. It is of vital importance that these forests should not be laid waste by reckless and improvident hands. It is not less important that the Uganda Railway should have cheap fuel. For a long time fuel alone was the object, but now that an elaborate Forestry Department has been established on the most scientific lines, there is a danger that forestry will be the only object, and the cost of fuel so raised by regulations, admirable in themselves, that the economy of the Uganda Railway may be impaired. And let us never forget that the Uganda Railway is the driving-wheel of the whole concern. What is needed here, as elsewhere, is a harmonious compromise between opposite and conflicting interests. That is all.
Presently our guide began to tell us of the strange creatures who live in the forest, and are sometimes seen quite close by the fuel-cutters—very rare antelope, enormous buffaloes, and astonishing birds and butterflies beyond imagination. He had managed to make friends with the Wandorobo—a tribe of forest-dwelling natives who live plunged in these impenetrable shades, who are so shy that, if once a stranger does but set eye upon their village, forthwith they abandon it; yet who are at the same time so teased by curiosity that they cannot resist peeping, peeping ever nearer and nearer to the fuel-cutters, until one day commercial relations are established on the basis of sugar for skins. I was just becoming interested in these wood-squirrels when we broke into the hot blaze of the noonday sun beating down on the polished railway track, and had to climb up on to our cowcatcher in order to hurry on to a real steam saw-mill ten miles farther up the line.
As the journey advances, the train mounts steadily higher and the aspect of the country changes. The forest, which has hitherto lapped the line closely on every side, now makes fair division with rolling hills of grass. And there is this extraordinary feature about it: where the forest areas end, they end abruptly. There is no ragged belt of trees less thickly grown; no transition. Smooth slopes of grass run up to the very edge of virgin forest, just as in England the meadow runs to the edge of the covert. The effect is to make the landscape surprisingly homelike. It is like travelling through a series of gigantic parks, where the hand of man has for hundreds of years decided exactly where trees shall grow and where they shall not.
Kavirondo Warriors at Kisumu.
Towards the west great plains are visible, in misty apparition, through rifts in the plateau. At length we arrive at the summit of the escarpment, and stop for luncheon by an indicator, which registers eight thousand two hundred and ninety feet above the sea-level. Southward rises a hill perhaps five hundred feet above us, from the top of which the waters of the Great Lake can be seen, like the waters of a distant ocean.
Geographically we have now reached the culminating point in this long journey. Henceforward, to find our way home, we have only to descend, guided by the force of gravity, first swiftly along the railroad to the Victoria Lake, then sedately with the stream of the Nile to the Mediterranean. The lofty table-lands of East Africa, with their crisp, chill air and English aspect, must now be left behind—not without many regrets—and the traveller will alight upon a middle world spread at a level of about four thousand feet, in which an entirely different order of conditions prevails. Downward then at thirty miles an hour, along the side of spacious valleys, around the shoulders of the hills, across thin-spun iron bridges, through whose girders one glances down at torrents flashing far below, onward to the Lake. Within an hour the temperature has sensibly altered. An overcoat is no longer necessary, even if you ride in front of the engine. In two hours the climate is warm and damp with the steamy heat of the Tropics. The freshness has gone out of the air, and in its place is that sense of sultry oppression which precedes the thunderstorms so common at this season of the year.
In order to avoid a hot night on the Lake shore we stopped at Fort Ternan, a placeless name, some forty miles from Kisumu, and rather more than a thousand feet above it. And here the storm which had been brooding all the afternoon over the western face of the Mau Escarpment burst upon us. Even after ten months on the South African veldt I was astonished by its fury. For nearly two hours the thunder crashed and roared in tremendous peals—