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.
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