No One Made Such Palaver About Taking A Seat As
Gray Shirt; I Did It Repeatedly Without Any Fuss To Speak Of.
That
lordly elephant-hunter, the Great Wiki, would, I fancy, have strode
over safely and with dignity, but the
Man who was in front of him
spun round on his own axis and flung his arms round the Fan, and
they went to earth together; the heavy load on Wiki's back drove
them into the mud like a pile-driver. However we got through in
time, and after I had got up the other side of the ravine I saw the
Fan let the Ajumba go on, and were busy searching themselves for
something.
I followed the Ajumba, and before I joined them felt a fearful
pricking irritation. Investigation of the affected part showed a
tick of terrific size with its head embedded in the flesh; pursuing
this interesting subject, I found three more, and had awfully hard
work to get them off and painful too for they give one not only a
feeling of irritation at their holding-on place, but a streak of
rheumatic-feeling pain up from it. On completing operations I went
on and came upon the Ajumba in a state more approved of by
Praxiteles than by the general public nowadays. They had found out
about elephant ticks, so I went on and got an excellent start for
the next stage.
By this time, shortly after noon on the first day, we had struck
into a mountainous and rocky country, and also struck a track - a
track you had to keep your eye on or you lost it in a minute, but
still a guide as to direction.
The forest trees here were mainly ebony and great hard wood trees,
{200} with no palms save my old enemy the climbing palm, calamus, as
usual, going on its long excursions, up one tree and down another,
bursting into a plume of fronds, and in the middle of each plume one
long spike sticking straight up, which was an unopened frond,
whenever it got a gleam of sunshine; running along the ground over
anything it meets, rock or fallen timber, all alike, its long, dark-
coloured, rope-like stem simply furred with thorns. Immense must be
the length of some of these climbing palms. One tree I noticed that
day that had hanging from its summit, a good one hundred and fifty
feet above us, a long straight ropelike palm stem.
The character of the whole forest was very interesting. Sometimes
for hours we passed among thousands upon thousands of gray-white
columns of uniform height (about 100-150 feet); at the top of these
the boughs branched out and interlaced among each other, forming a
canopy or ceiling, which dimmed the light even of the equatorial sun
to such an extent that no undergrowth could thrive in the gloom.
The statement of the struggle for existence was published here in
plain figures, but it was not, as in our climate, a struggle against
climate mainly, but an internecine war from over population.
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