The Footmarks And The Places Where The Elephants Had
Been Rolling Were By Now Filled With Water, And The Mud Underneath
Was In Places Hard And Slippery.
In spite of my determination to
preserve an awesome and unmoved calm while among these dangerous
savages, I had
To give way and laugh explosively; to see the portly,
powerful Pagan suddenly convert himself into a quadruped, while Gray
Shirt poised himself on one heel and waved his other leg in the air
to advertise to the assembled nations that he was about to sit down,
was irresistible. 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. Now
and again we passed among vast stems of buttressed trees, sometimes
enormous in girth; and from their far-away summits hung great bush-
ropes, some as straight as plumb lines, others coiled round, and
intertwined among each other, until one could fancy one was looking
on some mighty battle between armies of gigantic serpents, that had
been arrested at its height by some magic spell. All these bush-
ropes were as bare of foliage as a ship's wire rigging, but a good
many had thorns. I was very curious as to how they got up straight,
and investigation showed me that many of them were carried up with a
growing tree. The only true climbers were the calamus and the
rubber vine (Landolphia), both of which employ hook tackle.
Some stretches of this forest were made up of thin, spindly stemmed
trees of great height, and among these stretches I always noticed
the ruins of some forest giant, whose death by lightning or by his
superior height having given the demoniac tornado wind an extra grip
on him, had allowed sunlight to penetrate the lower regions of the
forest; and then evidently the seedlings and saplings, who had for
years been living a half-starved life for light, shot up. They
seemed to know that their one chance lay in getting with the
greatest rapidity to the level of the top of the forest. No time to
grow fat in the stem. No time to send out side branches, or any of
those vanities. Up, up to the light level, and he among them who
reached it first won in this game of life or death; for when he gets
there he spreads out his crown of upper branches, and shuts off the
life-giving sunshine from his competitors, who pale off and die, or
remain dragging on an attenuated existence waiting for another
chance, and waiting sometimes for centuries. There must be tens of
thousands of seeds which perish before they get their chance; but
the way the seeds of the hard wood African trees are packed, as it
were in cases specially made durable, is very wonderful. Indeed the
ways of Providence here are wonderful in their strange dual
intention to preserve and to destroy; but on the whole, as Peer Gynt
truly observes, "Ein guter Wirth - nein das ist er nicht."
We saw this influence of light on a large scale as soon as we
reached the open hills and mountains of the Sierra del Cristal, and
had to pass over those fearful avalanche-like timber falls on their
steep sides.
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