The train’s progress slowed and grew slower.  The panting of the engine came back to us in savage blasts.  We were climbing by curves and zigzags up the grim dark wall of mountains.  And as we mounted inch by inch, foot by foot, the air freshened and grew cooler—­not really cool yet by a very Jacob’s ladder of degrees, but delectable by comparison.

There was something peacefully exhilarating in the thought of rising from the red dead level of that awful plain, littered with the bones of camels and the slaves whom men pinned into the yokes to perish or survive in twos.* As we mounted foot by foot we fell asleep.  Later, as we mounted higher, we shivered under blankets.  There is a spirit and a spell of Africa that grip men even in sleep.  The curt engine blasts became in my dreams the panting of enormous beasts that fought.  A dream-continent waged war on itself, and bled.  I saw the caravans go, thousands long, the horsed and white-robed Arab in the lead—­the paid, fat, insolent askaris, flattering and flogging—­slaves burdened with ivory and other, naked, new ones, two in a yoke, shivering under the askari’s lash, the very last dogged by vultures and hyenas, lean as they, ill-nourished on such poor picking.

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* It was the cheerful Arab rule never to release one slave from the
yoke if the other failed on the journey, on the principle that then the
stronger would be more likely to care for, encourage, and drive the
weaker.
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Then I saw elephants in herds five thousand strong that screamed and stormed and crashed, flattening out villages in rage that man should interfere with them—­in fear of the ruthless few armed men with rifles in their rear.  Whole herds crashed pell-mell through artfully staged undergrowth into thirty-foot-deep pits, where they lingered and died of thirst, that Arabs (who sat smoking within hail until they died) might have the ivory.

And all I saw in my dream was nothing to the things I really was to see.  None of the cruelty of man, none of the rage and fear of animal have vanished yet from Africa.  Some of the cruelty is more refined; some of the herds are smaller; some good is making headway but Africa is unchanged on the whole.  It is a land of nightmares, with lovely oases and rare knights errant; a land whose past is gloom, whose present is twilight and uncertainty, but whose future under the rule of humane men is immeasurable, unimaginable.

In my dream din followed crash and confusion until the engine’s screaming at last awoke me.  My blanket had fallen to the floor and I was shivering from cold.  I jumped down to recover it and realized it was dawn already.  We were bowling along at a fine pace past green trees and undulating veld, and I wondered why the engine should keep on screaming like a thing demented.  I knelt on Fred’s berth to lean from the window and look ahead.  We were going round a slight curve and I could see the track ahead for miles.