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.
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