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 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.  The wonder of the extraordinary abundance of these wild animals mounts as the hours slip by.  At the stops for water or for orders the passengers gather from their different compartments to detail excitedly to each other what they have seen.  There is always an honest superenthusiast who believes he has seen rhinoceroses, lions, or leopards.  He is looked upon with envy by the credulous, and with exasperation by all others.

So the little train puffs and tugs along.  Suddenly it happens on a barbed wire fence, and immediately after enters the town of Nairobi.  The game has persisted right up to that barbed wire fence.