The Natives Are Careful To Warn
Strangers Of These Traps, And Also Of The Poisoned Beams Suspended On
The Tall
Trees for the purpose of killing elephants and hippopotami.
It is not difficult to detect the pitfalls after one's attention
Has
been called to them; but in places where they are careful to carry
the earth off to a distance, and a person is not thinking of such
things, a sudden descent of nine feet is an experience not easily
forgotten by the traveller. The sensations of one thus
instantaneously swallowed up by the earth are peculiar. A momentary
suspension of consciousness is followed by the rustling sound of a
shower of sand and dry grass, and the half-bewildered thought of
where he is, and how he came into darkness. Reason awakes to assure
him that he must have come down through that small opening of
daylight overhead, and that he is now where a hippopotamus ought to
have been. The descent of a hippopotamus pitfall is easy, but to get
out again into the upper air is a work of labour. The sides are
smooth and treacherous, and the cross reeds, which support the
covering, break in the attempt to get out by clutching them. A cry
from the depths is unheard by those around, and it is only by
repeated and most desperate efforts that the buried alive can regain
the upper world. At Tette we are told of a white hunter, of
unusually small stature, who plumped into a pit while stalking a
guinea-fowl on a tree. It was the labour of an entire forenoon to
get out; and he was congratulating himself on his escape, and
brushing off the clay from his clothes, when down he went into a
second pit, which happened, as is often the case, to be close beside
the first, and it was evening before he could work himself out of
THAT.
Elephants and buffaloes seldom return to the river by the same path
on two successive nights, they become so apprehensive of danger from
this human art. An old elephant will walk in advance of the herd,
and uncover the pits with his trunk, that the others may see the
openings and tread on firm ground. Female elephants are generally
the victims: more timid by nature than the males, and very motherly
in their anxiety for their calves, they carry their trunks up, trying
every breeze for fancied danger, which often in reality lies at their
feet. The tusker, fearing less, keeps his trunk down, and, warned in
time by that exquisitely sensitive organ, takes heed to his ways.
Our camp on the Sinjere stood under a wide-spreading wild fig-tree.
From the numbers of this family, of large size, dotted over the
country, the fig or banyan species would seem to have been held
sacred in Africa from the remotest times. The soil teemed with white
ants, whose clay tunnels, formed to screen them from the eyes of
birds, thread over the ground, up the trunks of trees, and along the
branches, from which the little architects clear away all rotten or
dead wood.
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