Then may the spell of the Elelescho exert its rightful power; then may it make famous the slender, sinewy, noble Masai ol-morani as, amidst his fair ones, his “doiye,”[11] he leads the song-accompanied dance as he goes out to war, and reigns the free lord of the wilderness! But to-day he bears on his brow the significant mark of an inexorable fate--that of the last of the Mohicans.
The spell of the Elelescho has departed from Lake Nakuro, once so remote from the world.
Iron railway lines link it with the Indian Ocean. Vanished from it is the spell that I once felt both waking and sleeping; gone is the poetry of the elephant herds, the Masai, the Wandorobo, and the caravan life in all its aspects; gone all that I saw there. The traveller, if he would learn to know the primitive life and ways, whether of men or of the animal world, if he would know the primeval harmony that speaks to him in an overpowering language peculiar to itself, must press on into the wilderness farther away from these tracks. This harmony, whose special character is day by day disappearing, day by day is in an ever increasing measure destroyed, cannot be recalled under the new, the coming system, the system that abandons itself to restlessness--that, in a word, which we call modern industry, modern civilisation.
[Illustration: A HERD OF WHITE-BEARDED GNUS AT CLOSE QUARTERS.]
[Illustration: THEY SHOW THEIR DISQUIET BY SWINGING THEIR TAILS.]
To-day one may perhaps read in the _East African Gazette_ that Mr. Smith, the railway engineer, favoured by extraordinary luck on a hunting expedition, has seen one solitary bull elephant not far from Lake Nakuro! This is something quite out of the ordinary, and Mr. Smith is to be congratulated. Unfortunately his efforts during many years to have even one young East African elephant sent to London have been without any result. A young animal is no longer to be found. In the same number of this newspaper, under another heading, we read the report that the export of ivory this year by the Uganda Railway has been utterly disappointing; the quantity carried has been terribly small, hardly worth mentioning!
I had a talk lately with a travelling companion who had spent some time with me in the wilderness ten years ago, and who had just revisited those distant lands, availing himself of the railway. Alfred Kaiser, a widely travelled man, recalled to me the life we had lived together, when there was yet hardly a trace of European influence among the people of the interior by Lake Victoria. In memory we saw again the inhabitants of then hardly known Sotikoland receiving us mistrustfully on their frontier, thousands strong. Their glittering spears sparkle in the morning sun; chiefs, ministers, and court ladies of the Wakawiróndo appear in camp in most primitive costume; club-armed warriors regard us with the most open distrust; cowry shells and artificial pearls form their costume and are used as their money; sudden attacks and fighting are quite in the order of the day.