Down
They Had Come, Crushing And Dragging Down With Them Those Near Them
Or Bound To Them By The Great Tough Climbers.
Getting over these falls was perilous, not to say scratchy work.
One or another member of our party always
Went through; and precious
uncomfortable going it was, I found, when I tried it in one above
Egaja; ten or twelve feet of crashing creaking timber, and then
flump on to a lot of rotten, wet debris, with more snakes and
centipedes among it than you had any immediate use for, even though
you were a collector; but there you had to stay, while Wiki, who was
a most critical connoisseur, selected from the surrounding forest a
bush-rope that he regarded as the correct remedy for the case, and
then up you were hauled, through the sticks you had turned the wrong
way on your down journey.
The Duke had a bad fall, going twenty feet or so before he found the
rubbish heap; while Fika, who went through with a heavy load on his
back, took us, on one occasion, half an hour to recover; and when we
had just got him to the top, and able to cling on to the upper
sticks, Wiki, who had been superintending operations, slipped
backwards, and went through on his own account. The bush-rope we
had been hauling on was too worn with the load to use again, and we
just hauled Wiki out with the first one we could drag down and cut;
and Wiki, when he came up, said we were reckless, and knew nothing
of bush ropes, which shows how ungrateful an African can be. It
makes the perspiration run down my nose whenever I think of it. The
sun was out that day; we were neatly situated on the Equator, and
the air was semisolid, with the stinking exhalations from the swamps
with which the mountain chain is fringed and intersected; and we
were hot enough without these things, because of the violent
exertion of getting these twelve to thirteen-stone gentlemen up
among us again, and the fine varied exercise of getting over the
fall on our own account.
When we got into the cool forest beyond it was delightful;
particularly if it happened to be one of those lovely stretches of
forest, gloomy down below, but giving hints that far away above us
was a world of bloom and scent and beauty which we saw as much of as
earth-worms in a flower-bed. Here and there the ground was strewn
with great cast blossoms, thick, wax-like, glorious cups of orange
and crimson and pure white, each one of which was in itself a
handful, and which told us that some of the trees around us were
showing a glory of colour to heaven alone. Sprinkled among them
were bunches of pure stephanotis-like flowers, which said that the
gaunt bush-ropes were rubber vines that had burst into flower when
they had seen the sun.
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