The other
boys, who want to go to sleep, threaten to "burst him" if he "no
finish." It's no good - cook carols on, and soon succumbing to the
irresistible charm of music, the other men have to join in the
choruses. The performance goes on for an hour, growing woollier and
woollier in tone, and then dying out in sleep.
I write by the light of an insect-haunted lantern, sitting on the
bed, which is tucked in among the trees some twenty yards away from
the boys' fire. There is a bird whistling in a deep rich note that
I have never heard before.
September 23rd. - Morning gloriously fine. Rout the boys out, and
start at seven, with Sasu, Head man, Xenia, Black boy, Kefalla and
Cook.
The great south-east wall of the mountain in front of us is quite
unflecked by cloud, and in the forest are thousands of bees. We
notice that the tongues of forest go up the mountain in some places
a hundred yards or more above the true line of the belt. These
tongues of forest get more and more heavily hung with lichen, and
the trees thinner and more stunted, towards their ends. I think
that these tongues are always in places where the wind does not get
full play. All those near our camping place on this south-east face
are so. It is evidently not a matter of soil, for there is ample
soil on this side above where the trees are, and then again on the
western side of the mountain - the side facing the sea - the timber
line is far higher up than on this. Nor, again, is it a matter of
angle that makes the timber line here so low, for those forests on
the Sierra del Cristal were growing luxuriantly over far steeper
grades. There is some peculiar local condition just here evidently,
or the forest would be up to the bottom of the wall of the crater.
I am not unreasonable enough to expect it to grow on that, but its
conduct in staying where it does requires explanation.
We clamber up into the long jungle grass region and go on our way
across a series of steep-sided, rounded grass hillocks, each of
which is separated from the others by dry, rocky watercourses. The
effects produced by the seed-ears of the long grass round us are
very beautiful; they look a golden brown, and each ear and leaf is
gemmed with dewdrops, and those of the grass on the sides of the
hillocks at a little distance off show a soft brown-pink.
After half an hour's climb, when we are close at the base of the
wall, I observe the men ahead halting, and coming up with them find
Monrovia Boy down a hole; a little deep blow-hole, in which, I am
informed, water is supposed to be.
