If you try to open a window you
are suffocated with more of the red dust. At last you fall into a doze;
to awaken nearly frozen! The train has climbed into what is, after weeks
of the tropics, comparative cold; and if you have not been warned to
carry wraps, you are in danger of pneumonia.
The gray dawn comes, and shortly, in the sudden tropical fashion, the
full light. You look out on a wide smiling grass country, with dips and
swales, and brushy river bottoms, and long slopes and hills thrusting up
in masses from down below the horizon, and singly here and there in the
immensities nearer at hand. The train winds and doubles on itself up the
gentle slopes and across the imperceptibly rising plains. But the
interest is not in these wide prospects, beautiful and smiling as they
may be, but in the game. It is everywhere. Far in the distance the herds
twinkle, half guessed in the shimmer of the bottom lands or dotting the
sides of the hills. Nearer at hand it stares as the train rumbles and
sways laboriously past. Occasionally it even becomes necessary to
whistle aside some impertinent kongoni that has placed himself between
the metals! The newcomer has but a theoretical knowledge at best of all
these animals; and he is intensely interested in identifying the various
species. The hartebeeste and the wildebeeste he learns quickly enough,
and of course the zebra and the giraffe are unmistakable; but the
smaller gazelles are legitimate subjects for discussion.
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