We were bowling along beside plantations of cocoanut, peanut, plantain and pineapple, with here and there a thicket of strange trees to show what the aboriginal jungle had once looked like.

When we stopped at wayside stations the heat increased insufferably, until we entered the great red desert that divides the coast-land from the hills, and after that all seemed death and dust, and haziness, and hell.
At first we passed occasional baobabs, with trunks fifteen or twenty feet thick and offshoots covering a quarter of an acre.

Then the trees thinned out to the sparse and shriveled all-but-dead things that struggle for existence on the border-lines between man's land and desolation.

At last we drew down the smoked panes over the window to escape the glare and sight of the depressing desolation.
The sun beat down on the iron roof.

The heat beat up from the tracks.
Red dust polluted the drinking water in the little upright tank.