J. Thomson. Through Masai Land.
Emin Pasha in Central Africa. Edited by Schweinfurth, Ratzel, Felkin, and Hartlaub. London, 1885.
Also well-known works by Livingstone, Stanley, &c.
[Note 38] p. 170.—Heat in the Desert.
50° Celsius, or Centigrade = 122° Fahrenheit. Temperatures of 121°, 122°, 133° Fahr., and so on, have been repeatedly recorded in the desert. Solymos, in his Desert Life, notes 115° Fahr. in the shade as the maximum for his year. He also calls attention to the frost and ice! “Duveyrier registered frost twenty-six times between December and March in the plains of the Central Sahara.” His picture of the desert-well is much less optimistic than Brehm’s.
[Note 39] p. 173.—The Termites.
Termites or “white ants” are very characteristic, wood-eating insects of tropical Africa and other warm countries. Though not related to the true ants, they have somewhat similar social organizations.
The reader will be rewarded who turns to Prof. Henry Drummond’s Tropical Africa, where there is not only a graphic description of the ways of the termites, but an interesting theory of their possible agricultural importance. As they avoid the light, and travel on the trees only under cover of their tunnels of finely-comminuted and cemented earth, they must be continually pulverizing the soil. When rain-storms come this fine dust is washed from the trees, and some of it may go to swell the alluvium of distant valleys. Hence the termite may be, like the earthworm, a soil-maker of considerable importance. Mr. H. A. Bryden, in his Gun and Camera in Southern Africa (London, 1893), writes as follows of the termites: “Our cases, portmanteaus, &c., were arranged round, but not touching the walls. Every article reposed on glass bottles, as the only known protection against the depredations of white ants.... They will eat large holes in a thick tweed coat in one night, and anything softer than metal left to their tender mercies for a night or two is irretrievably ruined.... If the huts are inspected every few days, the tunnels of self-made mortar can be swept away, and the depredator kept at all events to the flooring.... Most housewives have, at least once a year, to institute a crusade against the marauders, dig up the flooring, and attempt to find the queen. If the queen-ant can be successfully located and dug up, the nuisance is ended; the rest of the ants, bereft of their sovereign, at once quit the building, and for a season trouble no more.... In the forests to the north and west the mischief done by these insects is enormous. The tree is attacked, the tunnels are run up along the bole, the wood is pierced and riddled, and the work of destruction is soon completed.”
There is, however, a lack of precise observation as to the extent to which termites attack trees which are altogether sound and living. In great measure they merely hasten and complete a destruction for whose initiation they are not responsible.
[Note 40] p. 173.—Summer Sleep.