Still, Even If Your Own Peculiar Tastes And Avocations Do Not Take
You In Small Dug-Out Canoes Into The
Heart of the swamps, you can
observe the difference in the local scenery made by the flowing of
the tide
When you are on a vessel stuck on a sand-bank, in the Rio
del Rey for example. Moreover, as you will have little else to
attend to, save mosquitoes and mangrove flies, when in such a
situation, you may as well pursue the study. At the ebb gradually
the foliage of the lower branches of the mangroves grows wet and
muddy, until there is a great black band about three feet deep above
the surface of the water in all directions; gradually a network of
gray-white roots rises up, and below this again, gradually, a slope
of smooth and lead-grey slime. The effect is not in the least as if
the water had fallen, but as if the mangroves had, with one accord,
risen up out of it, and into it again they seem silently to sink
when the flood comes. But by this more safe, if still unpleasant,
method of observing mangrove-swamps, you miss seeing in full the
make of them, for away in their fastnesses the mangroves raise their
branches far above the reach of tide line, and the great gray roots
of the older trees are always sticking up in mid-air. But, fringing
the rivers, there is always a hedge of younger mangroves whose lower
branches get immersed.
At corners here and there from the river face you can see the land
being made from the waters. A mud-bank forms off it, a mangrove
seed lights on it, and the thing's done. Well! not done, perhaps,
but begun; for if the bank is high enough to get exposed at low
water, this pioneer mangrove grows. He has a wretched existence
though. You have only got to look at his dwarfed attenuated form to
see this. He gets joined by a few more bold spirits and they
struggle on together, their network of roots stopping abundance of
mud, and by good chance now and then a consignment of miscellaneous
debris of palm leaves, or a floating tree-trunk, but they always die
before they attain any considerable height. Still even in death
they collect. Their bare white stems remaining like a net gripped
in the mud, so that these pioneer mangrove heroes may be said to
have laid down their lives to make that mud-bank fit for
colonisation, for the time gradually comes when other mangroves can
and do colonise on it, and flourish, extending their territory
steadily; and the mud-bank joins up with, and becomes a part of,
Africa.
Right away on the inland fringe of the swamp - you may go some
hundreds of miles before you get there - you can see the rest of the
process. The mangroves there have risen up, and dried the mud to an
extent that is more than good for themselves, have over civilised
that mud in fact, and so the brackish waters of the tide - which,
although their enemy when too deep or too strong in salt, is
essential to their existence - cannot get to their roots. They have
done this gradually, as a mangrove does all things, but they have
done it, and down on to that mud come a whole set of palms from the
old mainland, who in their early colonisation days go through
similarly trying experiences. First the screw-pines come and live
among them; then the wine-palm and various creepers, and then the
oil-palm; and the debris of these plants being greater and making
better soil than dead mangroves, they work quicker and the mangrove
is doomed. Soon the salt waters are shut right out, the mangrove
dies, and that bit of Africa is made. It is very interesting to get
into these regions; you see along the river-bank a rich, thick,
lovely wall of soft-wooded plants, and behind this you find great
stretches of death; - miles and miles sometimes of gaunt white
mangrove skeletons standing on gray stuff that is not yet earth and
is no longer slime, and through the crust of which you can sink into
rotting putrefaction. Yet, long after you are dead, buried, and
forgotten, this will become a forest of soft-wooded plants and
palms; and finally of hard-wooded trees. Districts of this
description you will find in great sweeps of Kama country for
example, and in the rich low regions up to the base of the Sierra
del Cristal and the Rumby range.
You often hear the utter lifelessness of mangrove-swamps commented
on; why I do not know, for they are fairly heavily stocked with
fauna, though the species are comparatively few. There are the
crocodiles, more of them than any one wants; there are quantities of
flies, particularly the big silent mangrove-fly which lays an egg in
you under the skin; the egg becomes a maggot and stays there until
it feels fit to enter into external life. Then there are "slimy
things that crawl with legs upon a slimy sea," and any quantity of
hopping mud-fish, and crabs, and a certain mollusc, and in the water
various kinds of cat-fish. Birdless they are save for the flocks of
gray parrots that pass over them at evening, hoarsely squarking; and
save for this squarking of the parrots the swamps are silent all the
day, at least during the dry season; in the wet season there is no
silence night or day in West Africa, but that roar of the descending
deluge of rain that is more monotonous and more gloomy than any
silence can be. In the morning you do not hear the long, low,
mellow whistle of the plantain-eaters calling up the dawn, nor in
the evening the clock-bird nor the Handel-Festival-sized choruses of
frogs, or the crickets, that carry on their vesper controversy of
"she did" - "she didn't" so fiercely on hard land.
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