Our Path Now Ran East And More In The Middle Of
The Forest, And The Cool Shade Was Charming After The Heat We Had
Had Earlier In The Day.
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. The log, I conjecture, is odum or ebony,
and it is some fifty feet long; anyhow it is some sort of wood that
won't float. Gray Shirt says it is a bridge across an under-swamp
river. Having survived this and reached the opposite bank, we
shortly fell in with a party of men and women, who were taking, they
said, a parcel of rubber to Holty's. They told us N'dorko was quite
close, and that the plantations we saw before us were its outermost
ones, but spoke of a swamp, a bad swamp. We knew it, we said, in
the foolishness of our hearts thinking they meant the one we had
just forded, and leaving them resting, passed on our way; half-a-
mile further on we were wiser and sadder, for then we stood on the
rim of one of the biggest swamps I have ever seen south of the
Rivers. It stretched away in all directions, a great sheet of
filthy water, out of which sprang gorgeous marsh plants, in islands,
great banks of screw pine, and coppices of wine palm, with their
lovely fronds reflected back by the still, mirror-like water, so
that the reflection was as vivid as the reality, and above all
remarkable was a plant, {241} new and strange to me, whose pale-
green stem came up out of the water and then spread out in a
flattened surface, thin, and in a peculiarly graceful curve. This
flattened surface had growing out from it leaves, the size, shape
and colour of lily of the valley leaves; until I saw this thing I
had held the wine palm to be the queen of grace in the vegetable
kingdom, but this new beauty quite surpassed her.
Our path went straight into this swamp over the black rocks forming
its rim, in an imperative, no alternative, "Come-along-this-way"
style. Singlet, who was leading, carrying a good load of bottled
fish and a gorilla specimen, went at it like a man, and disappeared
before the eyes of us close following him, then and there down
through the water. He came up, thanks be, but his load is down
there now, worse luck. Then I said we must get the rubber carriers
who were coming this way to show us the ford; and so we sat down on
the bank a tired, disconsolate, dilapidated-looking row, until they
arrived. When they came up they did not plunge in forthwith; but
leisurely set about making a most nerve-shaking set of preparations,
taking off their clothes, and forming them into bundles, which, to
my horror, they put on the tops of their heads. The women carried
the rubber on their backs still, but rubber is none the worse for
being under water. The men went in first, each holding his gun high
above his head.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 86 of 190
Words from 86966 to 87976
of 194943
