season, when a drifting rain would drench down hour after hour, and the fifteen miles back to my house would seem so very long.
The train was punctual. It began to grow light at Naivasha. The line from here to Nairobi has always seemed to me depressing. The wretched station of Kijabe, where they provide breakfast, and miserable ill-tasting figs—the Uplands Bacon factory obtruding its modern presence and modern pork butchers—the dreary wattle plantations, so suggestive of our exploitation of the country—the sandy, washed away roads of the reserve—the groups of naked children and over-burdened women—old Wardell's house at Kikuyu station—how unutterably devastating to one's spirits it all is.
Two tradesmen got into my carriage at Nairobi. An old Scots- man—a storekeeper—bringing with him innumerable packages for his shop in Magadi, so as to avoid the freight on them, and a bald-headed, flushed, middle-aged man; drunken sweaty-faced and stinking of whiskey.
From Nairobi to Mombasa the line was all new to me. I had not travelled on it since I first came up country, ten years ago. I sat looking out of the window. Suddenly towards evening I became aware of the presence of Kilimanjaro—silent, dominating, dramatic.
I should think it was fifty miles away, across vast plains of waving feathery red grass, but in spite of the distance I could see its high glacial slopes quite clearly. The sun was going down and its sinking rays gave to the scene that particular wistful look which certain vast unchanging manifestations of nature take to themselves when illumined thus, at the last brief moments of a fading day. One could not help thinking of this mountain—here from the beginning—so aloof, so indifferent to the passing of the peoples in the plain lands below, to the passing of the primitive negroes, to the passing of the Masai with their spears and buffalo shields and tossing plumes, to the passing of us Anglo-Saxons with our commercial instincts, our whiskey, and vulgar, unseemly conversations.
May 30th. Arrived at Mombasa at nine in the morning. No room in any of the Hotels. At last I procured a sleeping place at the top of a tall Arab house in the native quarter, and made arrangements to have meals in the Savoy Hotel—a second rate place kept by a Greek.
After lunch to the sea; surely only English people could convert the finest part of their African coast into a suburban golf course.
