Hova Woman Weaving
The article is a silk làmba on a native loom
We had now reached a part of the country where the rofìa palm was the most prominent object in the vegetation, not on the hills, however, like the traveller’s tree, but chiefly in the valleys, where there is plenty of moisture. This palm grows very abundantly and can easily be distinguished from the other trees of its order. The trunk has a rough and rugged surface, and this reaches the height of twenty to thirty feet; but the leaves are its most striking feature; they are magnificent plumes, of enormous length, quite as long as the trunk itself. The midrib of these leaves has a very strong but light structure, some four to five inches wide at the base, and on this account it is largely used for ladders, for palanquin poles, for roofing, and indeed for anything needing lightness as well as strength. On these midribs are set a great number of grass-like pinnate fronds, from which, as already noticed, string and fibre are prepared for weaving. Great clusters of seeds (or fruits?), which are enclosed in a shiny brown skin, hang down from the top of the trunk. These are used for boxes to enclose small articles, as jewellery, etc. At one part of our journey the only road was through an extensive sheet of water, through which rose hundreds of rofìas, like the interior of some great temple, a most peculiar and beautiful sight, the great fronds above us quite shutting out the sunshine and making a green twilight below them.
A PLAGUE OF RATS
If we had been disposed to copy the titles of some popular evening entertainments, the nights preceding this Wednesday’s one might have been termed: “A Night with the Fleas,” and “A Night with the Mosquitoes,” but this was emphatically “A Night with the Rats.” We saw and heard them racing round the eaves of the house before we lay down, but as soon as the light was put out they descended and began to rattle about our pots and pans in search of food. We got up and fired a pistol among them, and this appeared for a time to scare them away; but later on their attentions became so personal that we were obliged to light a candle and keep it burning on the floor all night. After this we had comparative quiet, but before lighting the candle they had been scampering over my companion in his hammock and over myself as I lay on the floor.
Thursday’s journey, although shorter than that of most days, was perhaps the most difficult of all, especially the morning division of it—hills steeper than ever, and, if possible, rougher footpaths, so that we were often obliged to get down and walk, making the journey very fatiguing. For nearly three hours we were passing through dense forest, and in some places the path was really frightful. I do not wonder that a small company of soldiers brought up in the early years of the century by Captain Le Sage laid themselves down in despair at the difficulties of the roads they had to traverse. I found along the roadside several varieties of those beautiful-leaved plants, veined with scarlet and buff, which were so much cultivated in England about that time. Ferns of all kinds were very abundant, from the minutest species to the great tree-fern.
Our afternoon’s journey took us for some distance along a beautiful river which foamed and roared over the rocks in its course, and which we forded repeatedly. The path was most picturesque, but very fatiguing; in many places the track could hardly be distinguished at all from the dense rank growth of plants and long grass. We arrived at Béfòrona at one o’clock and fully intended to have proceeded another stage, as it was so early in the afternoon, but we found our men so exhausted that we were obliged to stay there for the rest of the day.
FOREST REGIONS
Here it may be noted that we had now entered some way into the lower and wider of the two belts of dense forest which extend for several hundred miles along the eastern side of Madagascar, and cover the mountains which form the great ramparts of the highland of the interior. There is continuous forest from nearly the north of the island to almost the southern extremity; its greatest width is about fifty miles, north of Antongil Bay; but to the south of the Antsihànaka province it divides into two. Of these two belts, the upper one, which clothes the edge of the highland, is the narrowest, being not much above ten or twelve miles across, but the lower belt is from twice to three times that breadth. On the western side of Madagascar there is no such continuous line of forest; there are, it is true, many extensive portions covered with wood, but in many places the vegetation consists more of scattered clumps of trees; while in the south-west, which is the driest part of the island, the prevailing trees and shrubs are euphorbia, and are spiny in character. Mr Baron reckoned that an area of nearly thirty thousand square miles of the whole surface is forest-covered country. We shall have other opportunities of examining these extensive forest regions, so all we need say further at present about them is, that no one with any eye for the beautiful and wonderful can pass through them without astonishment and delight. The variety and luxuriance of the foliage, the great height of many of the trees, the countless creeping and climbing plants that cover their trunks and branches, the multitude of lianas that bind everything together in a maze of cordage and ropes, the flowers which sometimes cover whole trees with a mass of colour, crimson, or golden, or purple—all these make a journey through these Madagascar forests a new pleasure and lead one to exclaim: “O Lord, how manifold are Thy works!”
We were now also ascending towards the central highland of the interior, which lies at an elevation of from five to six thousand feet above the sea-level. Above this general elevation, which, however, is broken up by lesser hills and mountains in all directions, so that there is no level country except what have been the beds of ancient lakes, now dried up, the highest mountains do not rise to great altitudes. The massif of Ankàratra, which forms the south-western boundary of Imèrina, the home of the Hova tribe, does not quite reach nine thousand feet in height above the sea. Until quite recently the summits of Ankàratra were always supposed to be the highest points of the island, but it has lately been discovered that there is a mountain called Ambòro, about eighty miles from the northernmost point, which is still higher, being nine thousand four hundred feet above sea-level. On my return to the coast in 1867 I found how much less difficult the journey from Antanànarìvo to Andòvorànto was than that in the opposite direction, owing, of course, to our descending nearly five thousand feet instead of ascending the same.