THE GREAT LAKE
We are off again on the Uganda Railway. Interesting and beautiful as
is the country through which the line passes from Mombasa to Nairobi,
it is surpassed by the magnificent scenery of the journey to the Lake.
First in order and in rank is the Great Rift. This curious fault in
the earth's surface, which geologists trace across the four thousand
miles of land and sea which separate us from Palestine, and onward
still to the southern end of Lake Tanganyika, is traversed by the
Uganda Railway at one of its most remarkable stages. For sixty miles
the Highland plateau has been rising steadily by a succession of
wooded undulations to a level of over six thousand feet. Now it falls
abruptly, almost precipitously, more than two thousand feet. This
frowning wall of rock and forest, which extends straight as a ruler
farther than eye can see, is the Kikuyu Escarpment. As the train
claws its way downwards by slant and zigzag along its face, a majestic
panorama breaks upon the view. Far below, bathed in sunshine,
stretching away to misty purple horizons, lie the broad expanses of
the Rift Valley. Its level surface is broken by strangely moulded
volcanic hills and shattered craters. The opposite mountain wall looms
up in the far distance, brown and blue. We gaze down upon the plain as
from a balloon, mistaking forests for patches of green grass, and
mighty trees for thorn-scrub.
[Illustration: THE RIFT VALLEY FROM THE KIKUYU ESCARPMENT.]
Another hour or so and Lake Naivasha comes into view. This sheet of
water is about ten miles square, and the rim of a submerged crater
makes an odd, crescent-shaped island in its midst. Its brackish waters
repel the inhabitants, but afford shelter to numberless wild-fowl and
many hippopotami. At Naivasha there is the Government stock farm. One
may see in their various flocks the native sheep, the half-bred
English, the three-quarter-bred, etc. The improvement is amazing. The
native sheep is a hairy animal, looking to the unpractised eye more
like a goat than a sheep. Crossed with Sussex or Australian blood,
his descendant is transformed into a woolled beast of familiar
aspect. At the next cross the progeny is almost indistinguishable from
the pure-bred English in appearance, but better adapted to the African
sun and climate. It is the same with cattle. In the first generation
the hump of the African ox vanishes. In the second he emerges a
respectable British Shorthorn. The object of this farm is twofold:
first, to find the type best adapted to local conditions; secondly, to
supply the settlers and the natives with a steadily broadening
fountain of good blood by which their flocks and herds may be trebled
and quadrupled in value. The enthusiasm and zeal of those in charge of
this work were refreshing. At present, however, their operations are
restricted by insufficient funds and by the precautions which must be
taken against East Coast fever. The first of these impediments may be
removed; the second is less tractable.
East Coast fever came across the German border a year and a half ago,
and since then, in spite of such preventive measures as our scanty
means allow, it has been gradually and slowly spreading through the
Protectorate. A diseased cow may take thirty days to die. In the
meantime wherever it goes the swarming ticks are infected. They hold
their poison for a year. If, during that time, other cattle pass over
the ground the ticks fasten upon them and inoculate them with the
sickness. And each new victim wanders off to spread the curse to new
ticks, who cast it back to new cattle, and so on till the end of the
story. At each point fresh areas of ground become distempered, and
fresh cows begin to drop off one by one, leaving their evil
inheritance to the ravening insects.
[Illustration: GOVERNMENT FARM AT NAIVASHA.]
So here we see the two principles of Nature at work
simultaneously--the blood-stock rams and bulls spreading their
healthy, fruitful life in ever-widening circles through the land; the
infected cattle carrying their message of death in all directions.
Every point that either attains, becomes at once a new centre of
vitality or dissolution. Both processes march deliberately forward to
limitless multiplications. The native is helpless in the face of
advancing ruin. Left to itself the evil would assuredly devour the
good, till the cattle were exterminated and the sickness starved to
death for lack of prey. But at this moment the white biped with
faculties of ratiocination intervenes from the tin-roofed Department
of Agriculture; discovers, for instance, that ground may be purified
by putting upon it sheep, into whom the ticks discharge their poison
harmlessly and are thereafter purged; erects hundreds of miles of wire
fencing to cut the country up into compartments, as a warship is
divided by bulkheads; encloses infected areas; destroys suspected
animals; searches methodically and ever more hopefully for
prophylactics and remedies; with one hand arrests the curse, with the
other speeds the blessing, and in so doing is surely discharging
rather an important function from a good many points of view.
My friends and I took four days in travelling to the Victoria Nyanza,
although the distance can be covered in twenty-four hours; for we
turned aside every day for sport or business, while our train waited
obligingly in a siding. Of the latter, indeed, there was no lack, for
the Governor and the heads of several departments were in the train,
and we laboured faithfully together at many prickly things. Then at
the stations came farmers, surveyors, and others, with words of
welcome or complaint, and a deputation of Boer settlers with many
expressions of loyalty to the Crown, and the chiefs of the Lumbwa and
Nandi tribes, with a crowd of warriors, and their Laibon with his four
wives, all in a row, till I was as tired of making "brief and
appropriate" speeches as my companions must have been of hearing them.
[Illustration: THE LAIBON'S WIVES.]
[Illustration: RAILHEAD AT KISUMU.]
But Elmenteita was all holiday. Lord Delamere met us at the station
with Cape carts, ponies, and hog-spears, and we drove off in search of
pig over an enormous plain thickly peopled with antelope and gazelle.
I cannot pretend to the experience of both countries necessary to
compare the merits of pig-sticking in India and in East Africa in
respect of the fighting qualities of the animal, nor the ground over
which he is pursued. But I should think the most accomplished member
of the Meerut Tent Club would admit that the courage and ferocity of
the African wart-hog, and the extreme roughness of the country, heaped
as it is with boulders and pitted with deep ant-bear holes concealed
by high grass, make pig-sticking in East Africa a sport which would
well deserve his serious and appreciative attention. At present it is
in its infancy, and very few even of the officers of the King's
African Rifles can boast the proficiency of the Indian expert.
But everything in East Africa is at its first page; and besides,
the wart-hog is, at present at any rate, regarded as dangerous
vermin who does incredible damage to native plantations, and whose
destruction--by any method, even the most difficult--is useful as well
as exciting.
Our first pig was a fine fellow, who galloped off with his tail
straight up in the air and his tusks gleaming mischievously, and
afforded a run of nearly three miles before he was killed. The risk of
the sport consists in this--that the pig cannot be overtaken and
effectively speared except by a horse absolutely at full gallop. The
ground is so trappy that one hardly cares to take one's eyes off it
for a moment. Yet during at least a hundred yards at a time the whole
attention of the rider must be riveted on the pig, within a few yards
of whom he is riding, and who may be expected to charge at any second.
A fall at such a climax is necessarily very dangerous, as the wart-hog
would certainly attack the unhorsed cavalier; yet no one can avoid the
chance. I do not know whether Anglo-India will shudder, but I should
certainly recommend the intending hunter in East Africa to strap a
revolver on his thigh in case of accidents. "You do not want it
often," as the American observed; "but when you do, you want it
badly."
We passed a jolly morning riding after these brutes and shooting a few
_Gazella Granti_ and _Gazella Thomsoni_, or "Grants" and "Tommies" as
they are familiarly called, and in looking for eland in the intervals.
At the end of Lake Elmenteita, a beautiful sheet of water, unhappily
brackish, a feast had been prepared, to which a number of gentlemen
from Lord Delamere's estates and the surrounding farms had been
bidden. A long array of flocks and herds was marshalled on both sides
of the track in due order, native-bred, half-bred, three-quarter-bred,
pure. Through these insignia of patriarchal wealth, which would have
excited the keenest interest in any traveller less hungry and more
instructed in such matters than I, we made our way to an excellent
luncheon, which, be sure, was not unaccompanied by the usual
discussion on East African politics.
It was late in the afternoon when we started back to the train, which
lay eight miles off in a siding. On the way we fell in with a most
fierce and monstrous pig, who led us a nice dance through bush and
grass and boulder. As he emerged into a patch of comparatively smooth,
open ground I made up my mind to spear him, urged my pony to her top
speed, and was just considering how best to do the deed when, without
the slightest provocation, or, at any rate, before he had been even
pricked, the pig turned sharp round and sprang at me, as if he were a
leopard. Luckily, my spear got in the way, and with a solid jar, which
made my arm stiff for a week, drove deep into his head and neck before
it broke, so that he was glad to sheer off with eighteen inches of it
sticking in him, and after a dash at my companion he took refuge in a
deep hole, from which no inducements or insults could draw him.
Later we rode and killed another pig and chased a fourth
unsuccessfully, and it was nearly dark before the railway was reached.
As I was getting into my carriage they calmly told me that _six lions_
had walked across the line a quarter of a mile away and a quarter of
an hour before. A settler who had been to lunch at Elmenteita was
loading a hastily-borrowed revolver before starting on his homeward
ride to Nakuru, and as I gave him some cartridges, I reflected that,
whatever may be the shortcomings of East Africa, the absence of an
interesting and varied fauna is certainly not among them.
Next day our train is climbing through dense and beautiful forests to
the summit of the Mau Escarpment. Admiration of the wealth and
splendour of the leafy kingdom is mingled with something very like awe
at its aggressive fertility. The great trees overhang the line. The
creepers trail down the cuttings, robing the red soil with cloaks of
flowers and foliage. The embankments are already covered. Every
clearing is densely overgrown with sinuous plants. But for the
ceaseless care with which the whole line is scraped and weeded it
would soon become impassable. As it is, the long fingers of the
encroaching forest are everywhere stretching out enviously towards the
bright metals. Neglect the Uganda Railway for a year, and it would
take an expedition to discover where it had run.
At Nyoro station nearly nine hundred natives were at work cutting
timber for the railway, which is entirely dependent on wood fuel. The
contractor in charge, a young English gentleman, who was described to
me as being a model employer of native labour in Government contracts,
had taken the trouble to cut a path through the forest across a loop
of the line in order that I might see what it was like inside. Through
this leafy tunnel, about a mile and a half long, we all accordingly
dived. There was nothing sinister in the aspect of this forest, for
all its density and confusion. The great giants towered up
magnificently to a hundred and fifty feet. Then came the ordinary
forest trees, much more thickly clustered. Below this again was a
layer of scrub and bushes; and under, around, and among the whole
flowed a vast sea of convolvulus-looking creeper. Through all this
four-fold veil the sunlight struggled down every twenty yards or so in
gleaming chequers of green and gold.
On the way the method of fuel-cutting is explained. So far as the
labourer is concerned, it is an elaborate system of piece-work, very
accurately and fairly adjusted, and, as is so often the case where the
white employer takes personal care of his men, there appeared to be no
difficulty in finding any number of natives. But they are a plaguey
company. Few will stay for more than a month or two, however
satisfied they may be with their work and its rewards; and just as
they begin to get skilful, off they go to their villages to cultivate
their gardens and their families, promising to come back another year,
or after the harvest, or at some other remote and indefinite date. And
meanwhile the railway must have its fuel every day and day after day,
with the remorseless monotony of the industrial machine.
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.
[Illustration: 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--
"Like water flung from some high crag,
The lightning fell with never a jag,
A river steep and wide,"
while the rain dashed down in sheets of water, one single gust of
which would drench you to the skin. But our train is an effective
shelter. We dine comfortably in the midst of the tempest, and
afterwards in a cooler atmosphere look up towards repentant stars and
a tear-stained sky.
At dawn we are at Kisumu. There is a stir of men, a crowded platform,
soldiers in order, groups of Indian traders, hundreds of Kavirondo
natives in their fullest undress, bunting, and introductions. Large
white steamers lie alongside the jetty, and beyond these the waters of
the Lake gleam their broad welcome to the sunrise. Kisumu, or Port
Florence as it is sometimes called, is the western terminus of the
Uganda Railway and the chief port on Lake Victoria. It possesses what
I am told is the highest dockyard in the world, and is the place at
which all the steamers now plying on the Lake have been put together.
One eight-hundred-ton cargo boat is actually in process of
construction, and will be launched in a few months' time to meet the
growing traffic of the Nyanza. The station itself is pretty; its trim
houses and shady trees, backed against the hills, overlook the wide
expanse of Kavirondo Bay and its encircling promontories. Unluckily,
it is unhealthy, for the climate is depressing and the sewage
accumulates in the tideless and shallow inlet. Some day one of two
things will happen: either the waters of the Victoria Nyanza will be
raised by a dam across the Ripon Falls and Kavirondo Bay will be
proportionately deepened and cleansed, or the railway will be
deflected and prolonged to its natural terminus on the deep waters of
the lake at Port Victoria.
The Kavirondo tribe, the greatest in this part of the country, had
organized an imposing demonstration. In dense array they lined the
road from the station to the Commissioner's house, and our party
walked through their midst in a perfect hubbub of horns and drums and
shrill salutations. All the warriors carried their spears, shields,
and war-paint, and most of them wore splendid plumes of ostrich
feathers. The Kavirondo are naked and unashamed. Both sexes are
accustomed to walk about in the primitive simplicity of Nature. Their
nudity is based not upon mere ignorance but reasoned policy. They have
a very strong prejudice against the wearing of clothes, which they
declare lead to immorality; and no Kavirondo woman can attire herself
even in the most exiguous raiment without sullying her reputation.
They are said to be the most moral of all the tribes dwelling on the
Lake shore. It is a pity that Herr Diogenes Teufelsdrˆckh, of the
University of Weissnichtwo, did not meet them in his rugged
wanderings, for they would surely have enabled him to add another page
to his monumental work on the functions of the tailor.
[Illustration: NANDI AND KAVIRONDO WARRIORS AT KISUMU.]
I wake up the next morning to find myself afloat on a magnificent
ship. Its long and spacious decks are as snowy as those of a pleasure
yacht. It is equipped with baths, electric light, and all modern
necessities. There is an excellent table, also a well-selected
library. Smart bluejackets--with ebon faces--are polishing the
brasswork; dapper, white-clad British naval officers pace the bridge.
We are steaming ten miles an hour across an immense sea of fresh water
as big as Scotland, and uplifted higher than the summit of Ben Nevis.
At times we are in a complete circle of lake and sky, without a sign
of land. At others we skirt lofty coasts covered with forest and
crowned with distant blue-brown mountains, or thread our course
between a multitude of beautiful islands. The air is cool and fresh,
the scenery splendid. We might be yachting off the coast of Cornwall
in July. We are upon the Equator, in the heart of Africa, and crossing
the Victoria Nyanza, four thousand feet above the sea!