My Men Shot A Black Rhinoceros In This Way, And I Felt Glad To Get Away
From The Only Place In Which I Ever Had Any Share In Night-Hunting.
We Passed Over The Immense Pan Ntwetwe, On Which The Latitude Could Be Taken
As At Sea.
Great tracts of this part of the country are of calcareous tufa,
with only a thin coating of soil; numbers of "baobab" and "mopane" trees
abound all over this hard, smooth surface.
About two miles beyond
the northern bank of the pan we unyoked under a fine specimen of the baobab,
here called, in the language of Bechuanas, Mowana; it consisted of
six branches united into one trunk. At three feet from the ground
it was eighty-five feet in circumference.
These mowana-trees are the most wonderful examples of vitality in the country;
it was therefore with surprise that we came upon a dead one at Tlomtla,
a few miles beyond this spot. It is the same as those
which Adamson and others believed, from specimens seen in Western Africa,
to have been alive before the flood. Arguing with a peculiar
mental idiosyncracy resembling color-blindness, common among
the French of the time, these savans came to the conclusion that
"therefore there never was any flood at all." I would back a true mowana
against a dozen floods, provided you do not boil it in hot sea-water;
but I can not believe that any of those now alive had a chance
of being subjected to the experiment of even the Noachian deluge.
The natives make a strong cord from the fibres contained in the pounded bark.
The whole of the trunk, as high as they can reach, is consequently often
quite denuded of its covering, which in the case of almost any other tree
would cause its death, but this has no effect on the mowana except to make it
throw out a new bark, which is done in the way of granulation.
This stripping of the bark is repeated frequently, so that it is common
to see the lower five or six feet an inch or two less in diameter
than the parts above; even portions of the bark which have broken
in the process of being taken off, but remain separated from the parts below,
though still connected with the tree above, continue to grow,
and resemble closely marks made in the necks of the cattle
of the island of Mull and of Caffre oxen, where a piece of skin is detached
and allowed to hang down. No external injury, not even a fire,
can destroy this tree from without; nor can any injury be done from within,
as it is quite common to find it hollow; and I have seen one
in which twenty or thirty men could lie down and sleep as in a hut.
Nor does cutting down exterminate it, for I saw instances in Angola
in which it continued to grow in length after it was lying on the ground.
Those trees called exogenous grow by means of successive layers
on the outside.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 138 of 572
Words from 73918 to 74435
of 306638
