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.
-- --------- * 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.
-- --------- 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.