“Once a week you will see a palm; once in three months the monkeys will cross your path; the flowers on the whole are few, the trees are poor, and, to be honest”—but enough; if this is honest description, the reader had better toss my books aside, for this chapter goes to prove that I differ in toto with the learned Professor’s views respecting tropical Africa.
We have travelled together thus far 1670 miles through the great central African forest, and we can vouch that the above description by Professor Drummond bears no more resemblance to tropical Africa than the tors of Devon, or the moors of Yorkshire, or the downs of Dover represent the smiling scenes of England, of leafy Warwickshire, the gardens of Kent, and the glorious vales of the isle. Nyassaland is not Africa, but itself. Neither can we call the wilderness of Masai Land, or the scrub-covered deserts of Kalahari, or the rolling grass land of Usukuma, or the thin forests of Unyamwezi, or, the ochreous acacia-covered area of Ugogo, anything but sections of a continent that boasts many zones. Africa is about three times greater than Europe in its extent, and is infinitely more varied. You have the desert of deserts in the Sahara, you have the steppes of Eastern Russia in Masai Land and parts of South Africa, you have the Castilian uplands in Unyamwezi, you have the best parts of France represented by Egypt, you have Switzerland in Ukonju and Toro, the Alps in Ruwenzori—you have Brazil in the Congo basin, the Amazon in the Congo River, and its immense forests rivalled by the Central African forest which I am about to describe.
The greatest length of this forest, that is from near Kabambarré in South Manyuema to Bagbomo on the Welle-Makua in West Niam-niam, is 621 miles; its average breadth is 517 miles, which makes a compact square area of 321,057 square miles. This is exclusive of the forest areas separated or penetrated into by campo-like reaches of grass land, or of the broad belts of timber which fill the lower levels of each great river basin like the Lumani, Lulungu, Welle-Mubangi, and the parent river from Bolobo to the Loika River.
The Congo and the Aruwimi rivers enabled us to penetrate this vast area of primeval woods a considerable length. I only mean to treat, therefore, of that portion which extends from Yambuya in 25° 3½′ E. L. to Indesura, 29° 59′ = 326½ English miles in a straight line.
Now let us look at this great forest, not for a scientific analysis of its woods and productions, but to get a real idea of what it is like. It covers such a vast area, it is so varied and yet so uniform in its features, that it would require many books to treat of it properly. Nay, if we regard it too closely, a legion of specialists would be needed. We have no time to examine the buds and the flowers or the fruit, and the many marvels of vegetation, or to regard the fine differences between bark and leaf in the various towering trees around us, or to compare the different exudations in the viscous or vitrified gums, or which drip in milky tears or amber globules, or opaline pastils, or to observe the industrious ants which ascend and descend up and down the tree shafts, whose deep wrinkles of bark are as valleys and ridges to the insect armies, or to wait for the furious struggle which will surely ensue between them and yonder army of red ants. Nor at this time do we care to probe into that mighty mass of dead tree, brown and porous as a sponge, for already it is a mere semblance of a prostrate log. Within it is alive with minute tribes. It would charm an entomologist. Put your ear to it, and you hear a distinct murmurous hum. It is the stir and movement of insect life in many forms, matchless in size, glorious in colour, radiant in livery, rejoicing in their occupations, exultant in their fierce but brief life, most insatiate of their kind, ravaging, foraging, fighting, destroying, building, and swarming everywhere and exploring everything. Lean but your hand on a tree, measure but your length on the ground, seat yourself on a fallen branch, and you will then understand what venom, fury, voracity, and activity breathes around you. Open your notebook, the page attracts a dozen butterflies, a honey-bee hovers over your hand; other forms of bees dash for your eyes; a wasp buzzes in your ear, a huge hornet menaces your face, an army of pismires come marching to your feet. Some are already crawling up, and will presently be digging their scissor-like mandibles in your neck. Woe! woe!
And yet it is all beautiful—but there must be no sitting or lying down on this seething earth. It is not like your pine groves and your dainty woods in England. It is a tropic world, and to enjoy it you must keep slowly moving.
Imagine the whole of France and the Iberian peninsula closely packed with trees varying from 20 to 180 feet high, whose crowns of foliage interlace and prevent any view of sky and sun, and each tree from a few inches to four feet in diameter. Then from tree to tree run cables from two inches to fifteen inches in diameter, up and down in loops and festoons and W’s and badly-formed M’s; fold them round the trees in great tight coils, until they have run up the entire height, like endless anacondas; let them flower and leaf luxuriantly, and mix up above with the foliage of the trees to hide the sun, then from the highest branches let fall the ends of the cables reaching near to the ground by hundreds with frayed extremities, for these represent the air roots of the Epiphytes; let slender cords hang down also in tassels with open thread-work at the ends. Work others through and through these as confusedly as possible, and pendent from branch to branch—with absolute disregard of material, and at every fork and on every horizontal branch plant cabbage-like lichens of the largest kind, and broad spear-leaved plants—these would represent the elephant-eared plant—and orchids and clusters of vegetable marvels, and a drapery of delicate ferns which abound. Now cover tree, branch, twig, and creeper with a thick moss like a green fur. Where the forest is compact as described above, we may not do more than cover the ground closely with a thick crop of phrynia, and amoma, and dwarf bush; but if the lightning, as frequently happens, has severed the crown of a proud tree, and let in the sunlight, or split a giant down to its roots, or scorched it dead, or a tornado has been uprooting a few trees, then the race for air and light has caused a multitude of baby trees to rush upward—crowded, crushing, and treading upon and strangling one another, until the whole is one impervious bush.
But the average forest is a mixture of these scenes. There will probably be groups of fifty trees standing like columns of a cathedral, grey and solemn in the twilight, and in the midst there will be a naked and gaunt patriarch, bleached white, and around it will have grown a young community, each young tree clambering upward to become heir to the area of light and sunshine once occupied by the sire. The law of primogeniture reigns here also.
There is also death from wounds, sickness, decay, hereditary disease and old age, and various accidents thinning the forest, removing the unfit, the weakly, the unadaptable, as among humanity. Let us suppose a tall chief among the giants, like an insolent son of Anak. By a head he lifts himself above his fellows—the monarch of all he surveys; but his pride attracts the lightning, and he becomes shivered to the roots, he topples, declines, and wounds half a dozen other trees in his fall. This is why we see so many tumorous excrescences, great goitrous swellings, and deformed trunks. The parasites again have frequently been outlived by the trees they had half strangled, and the deep marks of their forceful pressure may be traced up to the forks. Some have sickened by intense rivalry of other kinds, and have perished at an immature age; some have grown with a deep crook in their stems, by a prostrate log which had fallen and pressed them obliquely. Some have been injured by branches, fallen during a storm, and dwarfed untimely. Some have been gnawed by rodents, or have been sprained by elephants leaning on them to rub their prurient hides, and ants of all kinds have done infinite mischief. Some have been pecked at by birds, until we see ulcerous sores exuding great globules of gum, and frequently tall and short nomads have tried their axes, spears, and knives, on the trees, and hence we see that decay and death are busy here as with us.
To complete the mental picture of this ruthless forest, the ground should be strewn thickly with half formed humus of rotting twigs, leaves, branches; every few yards there should be a prostrate giant, a reeking compost of rotten fibres, and departed generations of insects, and colonies of ants, half veiled with masses of vines and shrouded by the leafage of a multitude of baby saplings, lengthy briars and calamus in many fathom lengths, and every mile or so there should be muddy streams, stagnant creeks, and shallow pools, green with duckweed, leaves of lotus and lilies, and a greasy green scum composed of millions of finite growths. Then people this vast region of woods with numberless fragments of tribes, who are at war with each other and who live apart from ten to fifty miles in the midst of a prostrate forest, amongst whose ruins they have planted the plantain, banana, manioc, beans, tobacco, colocassia, gourds, melons, &c., and who, in order to make their villages inaccessible, have resorted to every means of defence suggested to wild men by the nature of their lives. They have planted skewers along their paths, and cunningly hidden them under an apparently stray leaf, or on the lee side of a log, by striding over which the naked foot is pierced, and the intruder is either killed from the poison smeared on the tops of the skewers, or lamed for months. They have piled up branches, and have formed abattis of great trees, and they lie in wait behind with sheaves of poisoned arrows, wooden spears hardened in fire, and smeared with poison.