Wild Adventures in Wild Places

by Gordon Stables

Some degrees south of the Equator, and nearly four hundred miles from the eastern shores of Africa, a tributary of the river up which the saucy little Bluebell was so quietly steaming, suddenly broadened out into a beautiful lake. Here about a week after the events narrated in last chapter, our friends found themselves. Not even Captain Lyell knew the name of this sheet of water. Perhaps it never had one, but Chisholm was equal to the occasion.

“Call it,” he said, “Loch Row Allan, in honour of my departed friend the lion killer.” (Row Allan Gordon Cumming.)

And so, Loch Row Allan it was called.

I hope my young reader has not been taught at school to believe that the interior of Africa is composed entirely of deep, dark forests, entangled bush, and dismal swamp. If he has been, and could catch but one glance at the wild and charming scenery around this inland lake; how speedily he would be undeceived. It is a bold and rugged mountain land, hills above hills towering skywards, clusters of hills, not round but façaded—peaked, and clad to two-thirds of their height with gigantic forest trees and feathery palms. There is many a bosky glen and dell encompassed by these hills, and many a dark, wide wooded strath, and it did not detract in the least from the charm of the scenery, in our heroes’ view, to know that these glens and straths were the home of the elephant, the rhinoceros, and the king of the forest himself—the lordly lion. They determined to make this country their home for two or three months at the least, and with this end they built themselves and their people huts high up on the green side of a swelling hill that overlooked the lake.

The woods and the plains beyond, nature had stocked with herds of deer, the lake teemed with fish, there were patches of pine apples acres in extent, mango-trees, guava trees, oranges, citron, limes and pomolos, with bananas and plantains, and a hundred other delicious fruits they knew not even the names of. Surely in a land like this, there was but little chance of their falling short of the means of subsistence.

But do not imagine they had not to rough it, for that they often had; nor that the sun always shone, for that it did not. Sometimes great dark clouds would roll rapidly up from the horizon, and above them the fast disappearing blue of the sky looked preternaturally deep and intense, and from out these clouds the storm would burst in all its fierce intensity, lightning such as they had never seen before, thunder that seemed to rend the very hills, and rain that soon gathered into cataracts that steamed and foamed down the mountain sides, on their way to the lakes beneath. These storms ended almost as quickly as they had begun, and probably our heroes would have minded them but very little, had it not been for the fact that, a few minutes before the rain began to fall, scorpions, centipedes, and the largest and most loathsome of spiders, came hastily trooping into the hut to seek for shelter. What instinct teaches them to do this I wonder?

Many gigantic specimens of the rhinoceros fell before the fire of their rifles. They afforded good but not always safe sport, as Frank one day found to his cost. He appeared one morning dressed “after the fashion of the country,” as he termed it, with shoulders, arms, and face well greased and stained, and when he mounted his horse, every one was obliged to admit that, to say the least, he looked “a noble savage.”

Frank was greatly pleased at this, and away he rode, in company with his friend Chisholm, determined, he said, to put in a good day. There was a plain not far away from the encampment which Chisholm, who liked to retain Scottish nomenclature wherever he went, used to call the moor. Here, on this particular occasion, they had the good luck to fall in with several rhinoceroses, and rare sport they had with them. They did not wish to kill, they came out to chase, and rough though the ground was, they had the best of it. Frank slung his rifle behind him, and when he got alongside any of the monsters he used his riding whip, causing them at first to increase their speed, but soon to lose temper and stand at bay, and use their terrible horns. This gave the young man a chance of showing his horsemanship off to perfection.