As the expedition left the compound it was already day. The edge of the sun had leaped over the edge of the forest, the world was filled with light, and the sky was a sparkling blue.
What a scene that was! The limitless sea of snow-white mist rippled over by the sea of light, the mist billowed and spiralled by the dawn wind, great palm tops bursting through the haze, glittering effulgent with dew, birds breaking to the sky in coloured flocks, snow, and light, and the green of tremendous vegetation, and over all, new-built and beautiful, the blue, tranquil dome of sky.
It was song materialized in colour and form, the song of the primeval forests breaking from the mists of chaos, tremendous, triumphant, joyous, finding day at last, and greeting him with the glory of the palms, with the rustle of the n’sambyas tossing their golden bugles to the light, the drip and sigh of the euphorbia trees, the broad-leaved plantains and the thousand others whose forms hold the gloom of the forest in the mesh of their leaves.
“I have awakened, O God! I have awakened. Behold me, O Lord! I am Thine!”
Thus to the splendour of the sun and led by the trumpet of the wind sang the forest. A hundred million trees lent their voices to the song. A hundred million trees—acacia and palm, m’bina and cottonwood, thorn and mimosa; in gloom, in shine, in valley and on rise, mist-strewn and sun-stricken, all bending under the deep sweet billows of the wind.
At the edge of the forest Berselius and Adams took leave of Meeus. Neither Berselius nor Meeus showed any sign of the past day. They had “slept it off.” As for Adams, he knew nothing, except that the villagers had been punished and their houses destroyed.
The way lay due south. They were now treading that isthmus of woods which connects the two great forests which, united thus, make the forest of M’Bonga. The trees in this vast connecting wood are different from the trees in the main forests. You find here enormous acacias, monkey-bread trees, raphia palms and baobabs; less gloom, and fewer creeping and hanging plants.
Berselius, as a rule, brought with him a taxidermist, but this expedition was purely for sport. The tusks of whatever elephants were slain would be brought back, but no skins; unless, indeed, they were fortunate enough to find some rare or unknown species.