We Crossed A Lovely Little Stream Coming
Down The Hillside In A Cascade; And Then Our Path Plunged Into A
Beautiful Valley.
We had glimpses through the trees of an
amphitheatre of blue mist-veiled mountains coming down in a crescent
before us, and on all sides, save due west where the mangrove-swamp
came in.
Never shall I forget the exceeding beauty of that valley,
the foliage of the trees round us, the delicate wreaths and festoons
of climbing plants, the graceful delicate plumes of the palm trees,
interlacing among each other, and showing through all a background
of soft, pale, purple-blue mountains and forest, not really far
away, as the practised eye knew, but only made to look so by the
mist, which has this trick of giving suggestion of immense space
without destroying the beauty of detail. Those African misty
forests have the same marvellous distinctive quality that Turner
gives one in his greatest pictures. I am no artist, so I do not
know exactly what it is, but I see it is there. I luxuriated in the
exquisite beauty of that valley, little thinking or knowing what
there was in it besides beauty, as Allah "in mercy hid the book of
fate." On we went among the ferns and flowers until we met a swamp,
a different kind of swamp to those we had heretofore met, save the
little one last mentioned. This one was much larger, and a gem of
beauty; but we had to cross it. It was completely furnished with
characteristic flora. Fortunately when we got to its edge we saw a
woman crossing before us, but unfortunately she did not take a fancy
to our appearance, and instead of staying and having a chat about
the state of the roads, and the shortest way to N'dorko, she bolted
away across the swamp. I noticed she carefully took a course, not
the shortest, although that course immersed her to her armpits. In
we went after her, and when things were getting unpleasantly deep,
and feeling highly uncertain under foot, we found there was a great
log of a tree under the water which, as we had seen the lady's care
at this point, we deemed it advisable to walk on. All of us save
one, need I say that one was myself? effected this with safety. As
for me, when I was at the beginning of the submerged bridge, and
busily laying about in my mind for a definite opinion as to whether
it was better to walk on a slippy tree trunk bridge you could see,
or on one you could not, I was hurled off by that inexorable fate
that demands of me a personal acquaintance with fluvial and paludial
ground deposits; whereupon I took a header, and am thereby able to
inform the world, that there is between fifteen and twenty feet of
water each side of that log. I conscientiously went in on one side,
and came up on the other.
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