Nairobi is the capital and administrative centre of Kenya Colony, one of the most interesting and prosperous of Great Britain’s African possessions. It lies three hundred and twenty-seven miles from the sea in the very heart of British East Africa, about halfway between the Indian Ocean and Lake Victoria. It is situated on a plateau at an altitude higher than Denver, with mountains in sight far above any we have in Colorado.

When the sun is just right at Nairobi, I can get a glimpse here of Mt. Kilimanjaro and I can plainly see the peak of Mt. Kenya. Kilimanjaro is about a hundred and fifty miles distant and Kenya, as the crow flies, not more than one hundred miles. It is from Mt. Kenya that Kenya Colony is named. Mt. Kenya is one of the giants of the African continent, and is only three thousand feet lower than our own Mt. McKinley. It is a dead volcano and is supposed to have once been three thousand feet higher than it is now. The great peak, seamed with no less than fifteen glaciers, is a mass of rocks covered with snow, but the lower slopes are heavily wooded with forests of cedar, camphor, and bamboo. Above the woods are pastures fit for sheep, while in and below them are all sorts of wild game, including lions and elephants, and even rhinoceroses and hippopotami.

In some respects Nairobi reminds one of our frontier towns of the West. The high plain upon which it is situated has a climate in which white men can live and work the year around, and farms are springing up almost everywhere.

The city is comparatively new. Fifteen or more years ago it had hardly a house. To-day streets have been laid out over an area ten miles in circumference and hundreds of buildings of tin, wood, and stone have been erected. The chief building material is galvanized iron, which is so prevalent that Nairobi has been nicknamed the “tin city.” There are no saw mills or planing mills worth mentioning, as the forests have not been exploited, and about the only lumber available is that brought from the United States and Norway and landed at Mombasa. The ocean freight rates are heavy, and in addition there is the cost of bringing the lumber to Nairobi by railroad. Hence the galvanized iron, which comes here in sheets from England and Belgium. Almost all the buildings are of iron, put up just as it comes from the factory, giving the whole town a silver-gray colour. The post office is of iron, the depot has an iron roof, and the same is true of the governor’s offices. Many of the houses have iron ceilings and iron walls, and the chief retail business section is a collection of one-story iron booths, open at the front, in which Hindus stand or sit surrounded by their goods. My hotel is half iron. The government treasury near by, a shed not over fifteen feet square, is of tin and has a tin roof. I could chop it to pieces with a butcher knife; and the only sign of policing about it is the Negro who, gun in hand, stands outside guarding the door. The office of the land surveyor is of tin, and so are the police headquarters and the house where the supreme court is held. The more fancy dwellings are now being painted, and some stone and brick buildings are rising.

The Nairobi of to-day is largely cow pastures. It is a city of magnificent distances. All the places of importance seem to be several miles from each other and the patches between are often grazing ground. The houses are of one and two stories, and are scattered along wide streets which run for an indefinite distance out into the prairie. The chief ways of getting about are on foot, on horseback, or in jinrikishas, the last being by far the most popular. The jinrikishas are much like those used in Japan, save that they are larger and wider. I am told they are made in America. They are pushed and pulled by black Africans, two to each vehicle. One man goes in the shafts and the other pushes behind. They are each clad in a single cotton cloth which flaps back and forth as they run, exposing their nakedness. The streets are unpaved and frequently masses of dust. Along many of them eucalyptus trees have been planted and have grown so rapidly that most of the roads are now shaded by this mournfully drooping foliage.

The population of Nairobi is about twenty thousand, of which only a tenth are Europeans. Of the remainder, about a third are Asiatics from Hindustan, and the others are the queerest Africans one can imagine. I speak of them first, because they are everywhere; one stumbles over them on the street; they wait upon him in the hotels; they carry burdens for him and clog his footsteps when he goes outside the town. Many of them wear dirty, greasy cloths not more than a yard wide and two yards long. They hang them about their shoulders and let them fall down on each side, so that they flap this way and that in the breeze. Some wear breech cloths, and not a few are bare to the waist. In the early morning, when the air is still sharp, many of these people, clad in red flannel blankets, go stalking along with their legs uncovered to the thighs. I have already spoken of the ear plugs. Some have the holes in the lobes of their ears so stretched that I can put my fist through them. The loops are so long that when a man takes out his ear plug he hangs the loop of skin over the top of his ear to prevent its catching on something and tearing. The loop looks just like a leather strap about as wide as one’s little finger nail. I have handled many of them, twisting them this way and that to be sure they were genuine.

The African smell is everywhere. It burdens the air of the market places, and I verily think it might be chopped up into blocks and sold as a new kind of phosphate. The natives cover themselves with hair oil and body grease, and the combination of this when it turns rancid with the natural effluvia which exhales from their persons is indescribable. Some of the blacks smear their faces with a mixture of grease and red clay, and cover their hair with the same material, so that they look more like copper Indians than Africans.

These Africans do all the hard work of Nairobi. They are hewers of wood and drawers of water. I see scores of them, carrying baskets of dirt on their heads and bundles of wood on their backs and pushing and pulling carts and wagons through the streets. Most of my trips from one place to another are made in two-wheeled carts hauled by wire-bedecked natives.

The retail business is done by East Indians, as is also the case at Mombasa. I am told this is so in every settlement on this part of the continent. The Hindus have made their way along all the travelled routes, until their little stores may be found in every large African village. They have trading stations upon Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika. They are very enterprising, and as they live upon almost nothing they can undersell the whites. They sell cotton of bright colours and of the most gorgeous patterns, wire for jewellery, and all sorts of knickknacks that the African wants. They deal also in European goods, and one can buy of them almost anything from a needle to a sewing machine. Here at Nairobi there is an Indian bazaar covering nine acres which is quite as interesting as any similar institution in Tunis, Cairo, Bombay, or Calcutta. The stores are all open at the front, and the men squat in them with their gay goods piled about them. These Hindus dress in a quaint costume not unlike that of the English clergyman who wears a long black coat buttoned up to the throat. The only difference is that the Hindu’s trousers may be of bright-coloured calico, cut very tight, and his head may be covered with a flat skullcap of velvet embroidered in gold. Moreover, his feet are usually bare.

But Nairobi is a British city, notwithstanding its African and Asiatic inhabitants; the English form the ruling class. They are divided into castes, almost as much as are the East Indians. At the head are the government officials, the swells of the town. They dress well and spend a great deal of time out of office hours playing tennis and golf, which have already been introduced into this part of the black continent. They also ride about on horseback and in carriages, and manage to make a good show upon very low salaries. Allied to them are the sportsmen and the noble visitors from abroad. A scattering element of dukes, lords, and second sons of noble families has come out to invest, or to hunt big game. They are usually men of means, for the prices of large tracts of land are high and it also costs considerable money to fit out a game-shooting expedition. In addition, there are land speculators, who are chiefly young men from England or South Africa. Dressed in riding clothes, big helmet hats, and top boots, they dash about the country on ponies, and are especially in evidence around the bars of the hotels. There are but few white women here. Some of the government officials have their wives with them, and now and then a titled lady comes out to hunt with her friends. I met three women who had themselves shot lions.

Nairobi has English doctors, dentists, and lawyers. It has one photographer and two firms which advertise themselves as safari outfitters. These men supply sportsmen with tents, provisions, and other things for shooting trips, as well as porters to carry their stuff and chase the lions out of the jungles so that the hunters may get a shot at them.

It seems strange to have newspapers under the shadow of Mt. Kenya, and within a half day’s ride on horseback to lion and rhinoceros hunting. Nevertheless, Nairobi has three dailies, which also issue weekly editions. They are all banking on the future of the town and all claim to be prosperous. They are good-sized journals, selling for from two to three annas, or from four to six cents each. They have regular cable dispatches giving them the big news of the world, and they furnish full reports of the local cricket, polo, tennis, and golf matches. As for the advertisements, most of them come from the local merchants and some are odd to an extreme. One of to-day’s papers carries an advertisement signed by a well-known American circus company which wants to buy a white rhinoceros, a giant hog, some wild dogs, a wild-tailed mongoose, and a bongo. Another advertisement, one made along farming lines, is that of the Homestead Dairy, and others state that certain merchants will outfit hunters for shooting. There are many land sales advertised, as well as machinery, American wagons, and all sorts of agricultural implements.

Nairobi has several hotels, the accommodations in which are comfortable. I am stopping at the Norfolk at the upper end of the town. It is a low one-story building with a wide porch in front, separated from the dirt street by a picket fence, and shaded by eucalyptus trees through which the wind seems to be ever sighing and moaning. The charges are three dollars and thirty-three cents a day, including meals, but I have to have my own servant to make my bed and run my errands. I have a room at the back with a fine view of the stable. A German sportsman next door has a little cub lion, about as big as a Newfoundland dog, tied in a box outside his window. During a part of the day he lets the baby lion out, and ties him by a rope to one of the pillars of the porch. The animal seems harmless, but its teeth are sharp, and it is entirely too playful to suit me. Besides, it roars at night.

The horses are fairly good here, but the charges for them are steep. When I ride out on horseback it costs me a dollar and sixty-five cents an hour, and the carriage rates are still higher. The best way to get about is in the jinrikishas, using the natives as beasts of burden, but for a long ride over the plains horses are necessary.

The heavy hauling of this part of East Africa is done mostly by the sacred cattle of India. I mean the clean-cut animals with great humps on their backs. They are fine-looking and are apparently well-bred. Some of these beasts are hitched to American wagons brought out here from Wisconsin. I saw such a team hauling a Kentucky plough through the streets of Nairobi yesterday.

Indeed, I find that American goods are slowly making their way into these wilds. American axes and sewing machines, and American sowers and planters are sold by the East Indians. The drug stores carry our patent medicines and every market has more or less American cottons. The wood cutters are using American axes, but they complain of the flat or oval holes made for the handles. They say that a round hole would be better, as the natives who do the wood cutting are very clumsy and the handles snap off at the axe. If round holes were used, heavier handles could be put in and the Negroes could make them themselves.

Nairobi promises to become one of the railroad centres of this part of the world. It is the chief station between the Indian Ocean and Lake Victoria, and a road is now proposed from here to Mt. Kenya. The Uganda Railway goes through some of the poorest country in the colony, and the Mt. Kenya road will open up a rich agricultural region which is thickly populated by tribes more than ordinarily industrious. The railroad shops are here, and the employees have a large collection of tin cottages for their homes. The headquarters of the railroad, where the chief officers stay, are one-story tin buildings. The telegraphic offices are connected with them.

Both railroad and telegraph are run by the government. The telegraphic rates are comparatively low. Far off here in the jungles of Africa one can send messages much more cheaply than in the United States. A message of eight words from here to Uganda costs thirty-three cents, and one can telegraph to London about as cheaply as from New York to San Francisco. This is so notwithstanding the difficulty which the linemen have to keep up the wires, which the jewellery-loving natives steal. During the Nandi rebellion, forty-odd miles of it were carried away and never recovered, and in one of the provinces adjoining Uganda, above Lake Victoria, the natives are so crazy after the copper wire there used that it is almost impossible to keep the lines in shape.

Another serious danger to the telegraph is the big game. The giraffes reach up and play with the brackets and pull the wire this way and that. At Naivasha the hippopotami have once or twice butted down the poles, and I hear they have been doing considerable damage to the lines along the coast near the Tana River. In the heart of Uganda the monkeys have a way of swinging on the wires and twisting them together, which stops the transmission of messages, so that the way of the lineman is indeed hard.