1888.
Dec.
Forest.
The poison is not permitted to be manufactured in a village. It seems to be a necessity, to prevent fatal accidents, that the poison should be prepared in the bush. It is then laid on the iron arrows thickly, and into the splints of the hard wooden arrows.
Another poison is of a pale gluey colour. At Avisibba we discovered several baskets of dried red ants among the rafters, and I conjectured, from their resemblance in colour to the deadly poison which the Avisibbas used, that it must have been made by crushing them into a fine powder, and mixing it with palm oil. If one of these insects can raise a blister on the skin of the size of a groat, what may not the powder of mummied insects of the same species effect? If this pale poison be of this material, one must confess that, in the forest, they possess endless supplies of other insects still worse, such as the long black ants which infest the trumpet tree, a bite from one of which can only be compared to cautery from a red hot iron. But whatever it be, we have great faith in a strong hypodermic injection of carbonate of ammonium, and it may be that stronger doses of morphia than any that I ventured upon might succeed in conquering the fatal tetanic spasms which followed every puncture and preceded death.
When one of these poisons is fresh its consequences are rapid. There is excessive faintness, palpitation of the heart, nausea, pallor, and beads of perspiration break out over the body, and death ensues. One man died within one minute from a mere pin-hole, which pierced the right arm and right breast. A headman died within an hour and a quarter after being shot. A woman died during the time that she was carried a distance of one hundred paces; another woman died within twenty minutes; one man died within three hours; two others died after one hundred hours had elapsed. These various periods indicate that some poisons were fresh and others had become dry. Most of these wounds were sucked and washed and syringed, but evidently some of the poison was left, and caused death.
To render the poison ineffective, a strong emetic should be given, sucking and syringing should be resorted to, and a heavy solution of carbonate of ammonium should be injected into the wound, assuming that the native antidote was unknown.
As there is no grass throughout the forest region, the natives would be put to hard shifts to cover their houses were it not for the invaluable phrynia leaves, which grow everywhere, but most abundantly in the primeval woods. These leaves are from a foot to twenty inches in diameter, are attached to slender straight stalks from three to seven feet high. Both stalks and leaves are useful in the construction of native huts and camps. The fruit is like red cherries, but the rinds are not eaten, though the kernels are often eaten to “deceive the stomach.”
The wild fruits of the forest are various, and having been sustained through so many days of awful famine, it would be well to describe such as we found useful. We owe most to a fine stately tree with small leaves, which grows in large numbers along the south banks of the Ituri between East Long. 28° and 29°. Its fruit lies in pods about ten inches long, and which contain four heart-shaped beans called “makwemé,” an inch and a quarter long by an inch broad and half an inch thick. It has a tough dove-coloured skin which when cut shows a reddish inner skin. When this latter is scraped away the bean may be bruised, mashed, or boiled whole. It is better bruised, because, as the bean is rather leathery, it has a better chance of being cooked to be digestible. The pigmies taught us the art, and it may be well conceived that they have had often need of it to support life during their forest wanderings.
In the neighbourhood of these wood-bean trees grew a bastard bread-fruit called fenessi by the Zanzibaris, the fruit of which is as large as a water-melon. When ripe we found it delightful and wholesome.
On a higher level, as we followed the Ituri up from 1° 6′ to Lat. 1° 47′, we found the spondia or hog-plums, a yellow, fragrant fruit with a large stone. An india-rubber vine produced a pear-shaped fruit which, though of delicious odour, was the cause of much nausea; a fruit also of the size of a crab-apple, with an insipid sweetness about it, assisted to maintain life. Then there were some nuts like horse-chestnuts which we found the pigmies partial to, but we cannot speak very highly of them. Besides the cherry-like berries of the phrynia, the kernels of which were industriously sought after, were the rich red fruit of the amoma, within whose husks is found an acid sweet pulp, and the grains of paradise which were first introduced to England in the year 1815. The berries of the calamus, or rattan, were also eaten, but they were difficult to get. Figs also were tried, but they were not very tempting, though anything to disguise hunger and to “deceive the stomach” found favour. Even the cola nuts were eaten, but more for the sake of expectoration than for the sake of pandering to the digestive organs.
Among other articles to which we were reduced were white ants, slugs—not the tiger-slug—snails, crabs, tortoises, roast field-rats, and the siluroids of the streams.