They called it the Lunatic Express. A railway from Mombasa to Kisumu on Lake Victoria, 900 kilometres through desert, lion country, the Rift Valley and Maasai territory. Thirty-two thousand Indian labourers were brought to build it. Over a hundred were killed by lions at Tsavo alone, the infamous man-eaters whose story would later become legend. The railway cost millions of pounds and was ridiculed in British parliament. When it was finished in 1901, it changed East Africa forever, opening the interior to white settlement and making Nairobi, a swampy campsite, into a capital city.