- Start off steaming up river early in the morning time.
Land ahead showing mountainous.
Rather suddenly the banks grow
higher. Here and there in the forest are patches which look like
regular hand-made plantations, which they are not, but only patches
of egombie-gombie trees, showing that at this place was once a
native town. Whenever land is cleared along here, this tree springs
up all over the ground. It grows very rapidly, and has great leaves
something like a sycamore leaf, only much larger. These leaves
growing in a cluster at the top of the straight stem give an
umbrella-like appearance to the affair; so the natives call them and
an umbrella by the same name, but whether they think the umbrella is
like the tree or the tree is like the umbrella, I can't make out. I
am always getting myself mixed over this kind of thing in my
attempts "to contemplate phenomena from a scientific standpoint," as
Cambridge ordered me to do. I'll give the habit up. "You can't do
that sort of thing out here - It's the climate," and I will content
myself with stating the fact, that when a native comes into a store
and wants an umbrella, he asks for an egombie-gombie.
The uniformity of the height of the individual trees in one of these
patches is striking, and it arises from their all starting fair. I
cannot make out other things about them to my satisfaction, for you
very rarely see one of them in the wild bush, and then it does not
bear a fruit that the natives collect and use, and then chuck away
the stones round their domicile.
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