I cannot exactly say how long he had talked with me about elephants and elephant-hunting, about the ivory trade, and many other things. I only know one thing--that after some time his talk became more and more difficult for me to understand, that I strove in vain against an ever-increasing weariness, and that at last I saw neither the Arab nor the caravan--in a word, saw nothing more, felt nothing more. I fell into a deep sleep in which, in my dreams, I had a lively argument with some Europeans, who would not believe so many elephants, buffaloes, and other wild animals had formerly been here, and who kept on objecting strongly that it was impossible that all this could have been the case so short a time ago. When I woke up again I found myself in my lounging-chair, a primitive piece of furniture of my own construction. My black servant stood before me, and asked me if I would not rather go to bed. I rubbed my eyes--it had all been a dream, then; the spell of Elelescho must have inspired me with it. How foolish to yield to this spell! But men will perhaps so yield to it when all this has become “historical” and the Masai and their lives and deeds have, like the Redskins of America, found their Fenimore Cooper. 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. The lake is no longer remote. 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: _C. G. Schillings, phot._ A MORE DISTANT VIEW OF THEM.] [Illustration: THEY SHOW THEIR DISQUIET BY SWINGING THEIR TAILS.] [Illustration: _C. G. Schillings, phot._ FINALLY THEY DECIDE TO BEAT A RETREAT.] [Illustration: _C. G. Schillings, phot._ EFFECTS OF HEAT AND MIRAGE.]