These widely-spreading trees are favourites with the black wasps, to which they attach their pensile nests. Externally the nests are like fancifully cut brown-paper sacks, or a series of such sacks arranged one above another, with frills and ornate cuttings, like the fancy paper grate-covers in English parlours in summer time.
We avoided such trees religiously, and when there was no such terror as a big nest of wasps near, we could rest in comfort and examine the forest at leisure. We first saw besides countless grey columns, thousands of pendent slender threads and wavy lines, loops, festoons, clustered groups and broad breadths of grey mingled with more than studied disorder with darkest depths of green, lightened only by broad damp leaves reflecting stray glints of sunshine or sprays, and a magic dust of softened light perpetually shifting and playing, profound spaces of darkness relieved by a breadth of grey tree trunk, silvered rods of parasites, or fancy grey filigree of vine stems. As we surveyed the whole, the eye caught various crimson dots of phrynia berries, or red knots of amoma fruit, outer fringes of auburn leaves, a cap of a mushroom staring white out of a loose sheaf of delicate ferns, or snowy bits of hard fungi clinging like barnacles to a deeply-wrinkled log; the bright green of orchid leaves, the grey green face of a pendent leaf of an elephant-eared plant—films of moss, tumorous lumps on trees exuding tears of gum, which swarmed with ants, length after length of whiplike calamus—squirming and twisting lianes, and great serpent-like convolvuli, winding in and out by mazy galleries of dark shadows, and emerging triumphant far above to lean their weight on branches, running coils at one place, forming loops at another place, and then stretching loosely their interminable lengths out of sight.
As I have already said, the forest is typical of the life of humanity. No single glance can be taken of it without becoming conscious that decay, and death, and life, are at work there as with us. I never could cast a leisurely look at it but I found myself, unconsciously, wondering at some feature which reminded me of some scene in the civilised world. It has suggested a morning when I went to see the human tide flowing into the city over London Bridge between half-past seven and half-past eight, where I saw the pale, overworked, dwarfed, stoop-shouldered, on their way to their dismal struggle for existence. They were represented here faithfully, in all their youth, vigour, and decrepitude; one is prematurely aged and blanched, another is goitrous, another is organically weak, another is a hunchback, another suffers from poor nutrition, many are pallid from want of air and sunshine, many are supported by their neighbours because of constitutional infirmity, many of them are toppling one over another, as though they were the incurables of a hospital, and you wonder how they exist at all. Some are already dead, and lie buried under heaps of leaves, or are nurseries of bush families and parasites, or are colonised by hordes of destructive insects; some are bleached white by the palsying thunderbolt, or shivered by the levin brand, or quite decapitated; or some old veteran, centuries old, which was born before ever a Christian sailed south of the Equator, is decaying in core and vitals; but the majority have the assurance of insolent youth, with all its grace and elegance of form, the mighty strength of prime life, and the tranquil and silent pride of hoary old aristocrats; and you gather from a view of the whole one indisputable fact—that they are resolved to struggle for existence as long as they may. We see all characters of humanity here, except the martyr and suicide. For sacrifice is not within tree nature, and it may be that they only heard two precepts, “Obedience is better than sacrifice,” and “Live and multiply.”
And as there is nothing so ugly and distasteful to me as the mob of a Derby day, so there is nothing so ugly in forest nature as when I am reminded of it by the visible selfish rush towards the sky in a clearing, after it has been abandoned a few years. Hark! the bell strikes, the race is about to begin. I seem to hear the uproar of the rush, the fierce, heartless jostling and trampling, the cry, “Self for self, the devil take the weakest!” To see the white-hot excitement, the noisy fume and flutter, the curious inequalities of vigour, and the shameless disregard for order and decency!
It is worth pausing also to ask why small incidents in such an out of the way place as the trackless depths of a primeval forest should remind one of thoughts of friends and their homes in England. The melancholy sound of the wind fluttering the leafy world aloft, and the sad rustle of the foliage reminded me vividly of a night spent at —— House, where I passed half the time listening to the dreadful sighing of the rooky grove, which filled my mind with forlornness and discomfort. Here again, as I lay in my tent, were suggested memories of ocean gales, and general cold, pitiful wretchedness, and when the rain fell in an earnest shower and the heavy fall of raindrops roused the deep and funereal dirge that sounded round about me, it seemed to me I heard sad and doleful echoes of sad and unsatisfied longings, and crowds of unworded thoughts, and past aspirations, unbreathed sentiments of love, friendship, and unuttered sympathies advancing with awful distinctness to the sharpened imagination, until one seemed ready to dissolve in tears and gasp sobbingly, “Oh, my friends, the good God is above all, and knows all things!”
These are a few secrets of the woods that one learns in time, even without a mentor in forestry. To know that the Elais palm while requiring moisture requires plenty of sunshine to flourish, that the Raphia palm flourishes best by the sedge-lined swamp and stenchful sewery ooze, that the Calamus palm requires a thick bush for its support, that the Phœnix spinosa thrives best by the waterside, and that the Fan palm is killed by excessive moisture, is not difficult to learn. But for a stranger in tropic woods, accustomed to oak, beech, poplar, and pine, he is somewhat mazed at the unfamiliar leafage above him. By-and-by, however, he can tell at a glance which are the soft and hard woods. There are several families of soft woods, which stand in place of the pine and fir in the tropics, and these have invariably large leaves. It seems to be a rule that the soft woods shall have large leaves, and the hard woods shall have smaller leaves, though they vary according to their degrees of strength and durability. The trees of the Rubiaceæ order, for instance, have leaves almost similar in form and size to the castor-oil plant. The wood is most useful and workable, fit to build fleets of wooden vessels, or to be turned into beautiful domestic utensils—trays, benches, stools, troughs, wooden milk-pots, platters, mugs, spoons, drums, &c. It serves for boarding, ceiling, doors, fences, and palisades. Though it is brittle as cedar it will stand any amount of weather without splitting. There are more than one species of what is known as cotton-wood, but you may know them all by the magnificent buttresses, and their unsurpassed height, by the silver grey of their bark, and by the stiff thorns on their stems, by the white floss of their flowering and grey-green leaves.
Then there is the strong African teak, the camwood, the African mahogany, the green-heart, the lignum vitæ, the everlasting iron-wood, the no less hard yellow wood by the riverside, infinitely harder than an oak; the stink-wood, the ebony, the copal-wood tree with its glossy and burnished foliage, the arborescent wild mango, the small-leaved wild orange, the silver-boled wild fig, the butter tree, the acacia tribes, the stately mpafu, and the thousands of wild fruit-trees, most of which are unknown to me. Therefore, to understand what this truly tropical forest is like you must imagine all these confusedly mixed together, and lashed together by millions of vines, creepers, and giant convolvuli, until a perfect tangle has been formed, and sunshine quite shut out, except a little flickering dust of light here and there to tell you that the sun is out in the sky like a burning lustrous orb.
Considering how many months we were in the forest, the hundreds of miles we travelled through and through it, it is not the least wonder that an accident never befell one of the Expedition from the beginning to the end of our life in it, from the fall of a branch or a tree. Trees have fallen immediately before the van, and directly after the rear guard had passed; they have suddenly crashed to the earth on our flanks, and near the camps, by night as well as by day. The nearest escape we had was soon after we had landed from our boat one day, when a great ruin dropped into the river close to the stern, raising the boat up high with the mound of water raised by it, and spraying the crew who were at work.
Many people have already questioned me respecting the game in the forest. Elephant, buffalo, wild pig, bush antelopes, coneys, gazelles, chimpanzees, baboons, monkeys of all kinds, squirrels, civets, wild cats, genets, zebra—ichneumons, large rodents, are among the few we know to exist within the woods. The branches swarm with birds and bats, the air is alive with their sailing and soaring forms, the river teems with fish and bivalves, oysters and clams; there are few crocodiles and hippopotami also. But we must remember that all the tribes of the forest are naturally the most vicious and degraded of the human race on the face of the earth, though in my opinion they are quite as capable of improvement as the wild Caledonian, and susceptible of transformation into orderly and law-abiding peoples. The forest, however, does not admit of amicable intercourse. Strangers cannot see one another until they suddenly encounter, and are mutually paralysed with surprise at the fact. Instinctively they raise their weapons. One has a sheaf of arrows to kill game, and a poison as deadly as prussic acid; the other has a gun which sends a bullet with such force that the frontal bone is instantly smashed. Supposing that one at least of the parties is so amiable as to allow the other to kill him; his friends would dub him a fool, and nothing has been gained. The dead man’s friends must feel called upon to avenge him, and will hunt the murderer too. Fortunately, these buried peoples contrive to learn news of any strangers, and disappear generally in time before their villages are reached. But how far they have retreated, or how near they may be, is unknown; consequently as they are in the habit of eating what they kill it would not be safe for a small hunting party to set out to search for game. That is one reason why there were no animals hunted.
Secondly, it is not every person who has the gift of finding his way in a forest. A dozen times on a day’s march I had to correct the course of the van. Even such a grand landmark as a river was not sufficient to serve as a guide to the course. Within 200 yards any man in the Expedition, if he were turned about a little, would be bewildered to find his way back to the place whence he started.