A Much Better Fruit, Called Mobola, Was Also Presented To Us.
This bears,
around a pretty large stone, as much of the fleshy part as the common date,
and it is stripped off the seeds and preserved in bags in a similar manner
to that fruit.
Besides sweetness, the mobola has the flavor of strawberries,
with a touch of nauseousness. We carried some of them, dried as provisions,
more than a hundred miles from this spot.
The next fruit, named mamosho (mother of morning), is the most delicious
of all. It is about the size of a walnut, and, unlike most of the other
uncultivated fruits, has a seed no larger than that of a date.
The fleshy part is juicy, and somewhat like the cashew-apple,
with a pleasant acidity added. Fruits similar to those which
are here found on trees are found on the plains of the Kalahari,
growing on mere herbaceous plants. There are several other examples
of a similar nature. Shrubs, well known as such in the south,
assume the rank of trees as we go to the north; and the change
is quite gradual as our latitude decreases, the gradations being
herbaceous plants, shrubs, bushes, small, then large trees.
But it is questionable if, in the cases of mamosho, mobola, and mawa,
the tree and shrub are identical, though the fruits so closely
resemble each other; for I found both the dwarf and tree in the same latitude.
There is also a difference in the leaves, and they bear at different seasons.
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