THE UGANDA RAILWAY The soil seems rich. It is a fat clay, the colour of wellburnt 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 terra¬ cotta, 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.

It is a strange thing to go to sleep in the woods and then awake to find one's self rolling over a high, treeless coun¬ try with game by the thousand gambolling along the car tracks. We awoke on the Kapiti plains, which are about a mile above the sea and two hundred and sixty-eight miles from Mombasa. These plains are of a black sandy loam and covered with a thick grass. They look much as Iowa, Kansas, or Nebraska did when the railroads were first built through them and the buffaloes galloped along with the cars. The same conditions prevail here save that the game is of a half-dozen big kinds, and most of it is such as one can see only in our zoological gardens at home. According to law no shooting may be done for a mile on each side of the track, so that the road has become a great game preserve two miles in width and about six hundred miles long. The animals seem to know that they are safe when they are near the railroad, for most of them are as quiet as our domestic beasts when in the fields.

Let me give you some notes which I made with these wild animals on all sides of me. I copy: “These Kapiti plains are flat and I am riding through vast herds of ante¬ lopes and zebras. Some of them are within pistol shot of 245