The road they were pursuing through the forest was just a dim track beaten down by the feet of the copal and cassava gatherers bearing their loads to Yandjali. Here and there the forest thinned out and a riot of umbrella thorns, vicious, sword-like grass and tall, dull purple flowers, like hollyhocks made a scrub that choked the way and tangled the foot; then the trees would thicken up, and with the green gloom of a mighty wave the forest would fall upon the travellers and swallow them up.
Adams, tramping beside Berselius, tried vainly to analyze the extraordinary and new sensations to which this place gave birth in him.
The forest had taken him. It seemed to him, on entering it, that he had died to all the things he had ever known. At Yandjali he had felt himself in a foreign country, but still in touch with Europe and the past; a mile deep in the forest and Yandjali itself, savage as it was, seemed part of the civilization and the life he had left behind him.
The forests of the old world may be vast, but their trees are familiar. One may lose one’s direction, but one can never lose oneself amidst the friendly pines, the beeches, the oaks, whose forms have been known to us from childhood.
But here, where the beard-moss hangs from unknown trees, as we tramp through the sweltering sap-scented gloom, we feel ourselves not in a forest but under a cover.
There is nothing of the perfume of the pine, nothing of the breeze in the branches, nothing of the beauty of the forest twilight here. We are in a great green room, festooned with vines and tendrils and hung about with leaves. Nothing is beautiful here, but everything is curious. It is a curiosity shop, where one pays with the sweat of one’s brow, with the languor of one’s body, and the remembrance of one’s past, for the sight of an orchid shaped like a bird, or a flower shaped like a jug, or a bird whose flight is a flash of sapphire dust.
A great green room, where echo sounds of things unknown.
You can see nothing but the foliage, and the tree boles just around, yet the place is full of life and war and danger.
That crash followed by the shrieking of birds—you cannot tell whether it is half a mile away or quite close, or to the right, or to the left, or whether it is caused by a branch torn from a tree by some huge hand, or a tree a hundred years old felled at last by Time.
Time is the woodman of the Congo forests. Nobody else could do the work, and he works in his own lazy fashion, leaving things to right themselves and find their own salvation.