CAIRO TO KISUMU thousand pieces and the heaviest piece weighed five tons. The average weight was about one hundred pounds. The greatest care had to be taken to keep the parts to¬ gether and in their own places. Every piece was numbered and those of different bridges were painted in different colours. At that, it was hard to keep all the parts together, for, since most of the natives here look upon steel as so much jewellery, it was all but impossible to keep them from filching some of the smaller pieces for ear bobs and telegraph wire to make into bracelets.

Besides all the other tremendous difficulties in building this road, there were the wild beasts. There are a hundred places along it where one might get off and start up a lion.

Rhinoceroses have butted the freight cars along the track, and infest much of the country through which it goes. I was shown a station yesterday where twenty-nine Hindus were carried off by two man-eating lions. Night after night the man-eaters came, taking away each time one or two of the workmen from the construction camp. They were finally killed by an English overseer, who sat up with his gun and watched for them.

It was not far from this station of Nairobi that a man was taken out of a special car while it stopped overnight on the side track. The windows and doors of the car had been left open for air, and the three men who were its only inmates had gone to sleep. Two were in the berths while the other, who had sat up to watch, was on the floor with his gun on his knees. As the night went on he fell asleep, and woke to find himself under the belly of a lion. The beast had slipped in through the door, and, jumping over him, seized the man in the lower berth and leaped out of the window, carrying him along. The other two men 250