n. Then the mules had to be urged up a very narrow gang-lank
into a dangerous-looking car. Quite sensibly they declined to take
chances. We persuaded them. The process was quite simple. Two of the men
holding the ends at a safe distance stretched a light strong cord across
the beasts' hind legs, and sawed it back and forth.

We clanged the doors shut, climbed aboard, and the train at last
steamed on. Now bits of forest came across our way, deep, shaded, with
trailing curtain vines, and wide leaves as big as table tops, and high,
lush, impenetrable undergrowth full of flashing birds, fathomless
shadows, and inquisitive monkeys. Occasionally we emerged to the edge of
a long oval meadow, set in depressions among hills, like our Sierra
meadows. Indeed so like were these openings to those in our own wooded
mountains that we always experienced a distinct shock of surprise as the
familiar woods parted to disclose a dark solemn savage with flashing
spear.

We stopped at various stations, and descended and walked about in the
gathering shadows of the forest. It was getting cool. Many little things
attracted our attention, to remain in our memories as isolated pictures.
Thus I remember one grave savage squatted by the track playing on a sort
of mandoline-shaped instrument. It had two strings, and he twanged these
alternately, without the slightest effort to change their pitch by
stopping with his fingers. He bent his head sidewise, and listened with
the meticulous attention of a connoisseur. We stopped at that place for
fully ten minutes, but not for a second did he leave off twanging his
two strings, nor did he even momentarily relax his attention.

It was now near sundown. We had been climbing steadily. The train
shrieked twice, and unexpectedly slid out to the edge of the Likipia
Escarpment. We looked down once more into the great Rift Valley.

The Rift Valley is as though a strip of Africa--extending half the
length of the continent--had in time past sunk bodily some thousands of
feet, leaving a more or less sheer escarpment on either side, and
preserving intact its own variegated landscape in the bottom. We were on
the Likipia Escarpment. We looked across to the Mau Escarpment, where
the country over which our train had been travelling continued after its
interruption by the valley. And below us were mountains, streams,
plains. The westering sun threw strong slants of light down and across.

The engine shut off its power