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CAIRO TO KISUMU 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 al¬ most 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.
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