idnight in
pyjamas did the business; and shortly I paid well for the fun.

PART III.

NAIROBI.

XIII.

UP FROM THE COAST.

Nairobi is situated at the far edge of the great Athi Plains and just
below a range of hills. It might about as well have been anywhere else,
and perhaps better a few miles back in the higher country. Whether the
funny little narrow-gauge railroad exists for Nairobi, or Nairobi for
the railroad, it would be difficult to say. Between Mombasa and this
interior placed-to-order town, certainly, there is nothing, absolutely
nothing, either in passengers or freight, to justify building the line.
That distance is, if I remember it correctly, about three hundred and
twenty miles. A dozen or so names of stations appear on the map. These
are water tanks, telegraph stations, or small groups of tents in which
dwell black labourers--on the railroad.

The way climbs out from the tropical steaming coast belt to and across
the high scrub desert, and then through lower rounded hills to the
plains. On the desert is only dense thorn brush--and a possibility that
the newcomer, if he looks very closely, may to his excitement see his
first game in Africa. This is a stray duiker or so, tiny grass antelopes
a foot high. Also in this land is thirst; so that alongside the
locomotives, as they struggle up grade, in bad seasons, run natives to
catch precious drops.[5] An impalpable red dust sifts through and into
everything. When a man descends at Voi for dinner he finds his
fellow-travellers have changed complexion. The pale clerk from indoor
Mombasa has put on a fine healthy sunburn; and the company in general
present a rich out-of-doors bloom. A chance dab with a white napkin
comes away like fresh paint, however.

You clamber back into the compartment, with its latticed sun shades and
its smoked glass windows; you let down the narrow canvas bunk; you
unfold your rug, and settle yourself for repose. It is a difficult
matter. Everything you touch is gritty. The air is close and stifling,
like the smoke-charged air of a tunnel. 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