And now, only ten years later, Kaiser has seen the Masai at Lake Nakuro, English-speaking caricatures of civilisation.
A feeling of something like resentment comes upon the traveller who has had to pay toll for his journey with the ceaseless sweat of his brow, when he thinks that now any one can reach Lake Nakuro in a few days from the coast. It is true that the over-anxious globe-trotter is kept in check by only too well justified fears of the treacherous malaria and the sleeping-sickness that has made such terrible progress of late. Otherwise the railway journey from Mombassa to the Victoria Nyanza, and then down the Nile to Cairo, would be a much-travelled route.
I have tried to describe, in brief outline, the rapid, unwelcome change of our time, the result of European civilisation forcing its way in. As I describe things, so they were half a century ago, and even yet ten years ago, when I stayed by the shores of Nakuro, and no railway had yet been made there.
To-day one can no longer find the old spell of the Elelescho there, or anywhere else where the white man has penetrated.
The traveller probably sees only a shrubby plant.
It covers many a ridge, and the lonely plains of the uplands, and sends afar its spicy perfume. The botanists call it _Tarchonantus camphoratus_, L. They class it among the Compositæ.
But here it can no longer exercise any spell.
That has flown far, far away, into the interior. There, where the white man has not yet come, it still prolongs its existence.
How long, yet will it be before it has entirely departed?
[Illustration: GROUP OF MASAI--THE WARRIOR ON THE LEFT DRESSED IN A COSTUME IMPROVISED OUT OF A COLOURED BED QUILT.]
[Illustration: ONE OF THE OLDEST “NATURE DOCUMENTS” FROM THE HAND OF MAN. PREHISTORIC SKETCH OF A MAMMOTH ON A FRAGMENT OF IVORY.
(From L. Reinhardt’s work _Der Mensch zur Eiszeit in Europa_.)]
From the Cave-dweller’s Sketch to the Flashlight Photograph
The mysterious charm of wild nature, undisturbed, almost untouched, by the hand of man,--the charm inherent in all that I have in mind when I talk of “the spell of the Elelescho”--explains the keen and profound interest with which my pictures of animal life were received at home.